HEATED Debate on Peter Thiel, Lutnick & Scariest AI Outcome | Pomp

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I have to assume there is something darker there because then he's also one of the most powerful people in the world standing right next to the president, like places where the commerce secretary, it's like, is that the guy you should be standing next? I feel like that's where the secretary of state should be instead. Like he seems to be everywhere and like it just, there is something so insidious. But go back for a second, right? So, and this just may be a different way that we kind of approach these things. I mean, I'm the president of the Howard Lutnick Hate Club, to be clear, if we're being fair. You should invite him. I don't know if he would come, but you should invite him to see if he would come. All right, Anthony Pompliano, are you here as a Palantir agent on behalf of Kevin O'Leary or what's the story? Well, Palantir and Kevin O'Leary are two completely different things. Not in my book. Same thing to me. Mr. Wonderful is looking like Mr. Teal these days. I don't know. All right. Well, what's the big issue you got with AI? So AI as a whole, I don't have an issue with technology progressing. Okay. In the past, but the big but is this is the first time where technology could have the potential to outthink us if very, very irresponsible, say power hungry people living in places like Argentina and getting off the X right now are allowed to be put in charge of whatever it becomes. And that I do have concern about. So I want to make sure that if we're building technology, technology works for the people. And I want to make sure that if we're building technology, technology works for the people. And also want to look out for all the people coming into the job market now who are very worried about living in a world where suddenly technology is doing things that they're not even able to enter the workforce or have a, you know, purpose in life. I think these are really important topics. But I think it's important to talk about to see if we can find a great way forward. So hopefully you're going to help with that today. Well, I think that most of what you've been told is wrong. And I can say that as someone who nine months ago, 12 months ago, I believed a lot of those things. And I think that most of what you've been told is wrong. market to engineer growth. They call it stimulus for me. Would you characterize that for people out there as like a hidden tax, basically? Well, inflation in general is a hidden tax. I think it's one of the most destructive things that happens in the U.S. economy. But what they basically did is they took this thing that was already destructive and they supercharged it. Yes. And so if you go back to 2020, I put a lot of content on the Internet, right? I am yelling and screaming at the top of my lungs saying you cannot print five trillion, eight trillion, nine trillion dollars and not get inflation. Now, what happened, which I think confused a lot of folks, is that they printed the money in 2020. The inflation didn't actually show up until 2022. Why is that? Well, they announced, OK, we're going to we're going to do a stimulus package of, you know, make up a number of two trillion dollars, two trillion dollars tomorrow doesn't go into the market. What they do is they create all these different programs that people can get access to the money. So now they have to go and say, OK, well, here's the rules of how you can get it. So the PPP loan. Program or these various things. Then people have to say, oh, wait a minute, the government's handing out money. How do I get some of that money? And they run around and they try to figure out how do they apply for it or get the handout or whatever. And so as you work through the economy, it takes time to actually take the money from an idea, which essentially was let's stimulate the economy to actually being in the hands of people in the economy. And so what you saw was 2020, they start printing money. 2021, they print even more money. And as they're doing this, they're announcing both fiscal. And monetary programs, individual investors are like, oh, boy, here comes this tsunami of money. Well, guess what happens? There is going to be a case shaped impact. The people holding assets are about to get real rich because all of that money is more money chasing the same number of assets. The asset prices go up. The people who don't own assets, who 50 percent of the country just is saving. Yeah, they're about to get smashed. Yep. And that's what happened is they got hit with nine plus percent inflation, according to the official. numbers. And so that meant that if you had a dollar at If you look at the numbers today, if you had $1 in 2020, today it can buy about $0.70 worth of goods. You've lost 30% of the value of the U.S. dollar in six years. And you said a phrase there. You said the official number. You suspect it's worse. Well, the U.S. government is really bad at counting. If you go and you look – Don't tell that to Pete Hanks. They're bad at counting in a lot of ways. But there's a government organization called the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is basically in charge of measuring lots of economic data points. You have to remember, we're talking about the government. We are not talking about the latest cutting-edge technology. So what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does is a couple of examples. They send people physically into grocery stores, and they say to them, here's a tablet. I want you to go find the Campbell's soup that is light salt, and I want you to manually input the price of that Campbell's soup into this tablet. If I sent you, very good-looking, smart, intelligent person who would want to do a good job, into the grocery store, and I give you a list of 50 items to accurately input the prices, how many do you think you'd get right? I mean, I think I'd get 50, but, like, this is the shit we should use AI for. All right, so that's the first thing. There's a robot in there. So that's the first thing is you've got this kind of manual data input. Another thing that they do is there's something called homeowner's equivalent rent. So homeowner's equivalent rent is they call you on the phone. Let's say you own a home, and they say, hey, Julian, how much do you think you could rent your house for? If you ask somebody who owns a home, how much do you think you could rent your house for? Do you know how much they think they could rent their home for? They got no clue. They have no clue. So guess what? They think they're rich. They probably overstated by 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. They're guessing. Yeah. The problem is if you actually look, we have real data points. You can just go on Zillow, Redfin, StreetEasy, whatever. What are the homes that have rented in the last 30 days in America or in a city and just look at that data? What are the prices on the grocery store when you go and you look online? So there's a mismatch of modern technology. There's a mismatch of modern technology and their data collection. But the more interesting thing is then they have messed with the methodology. So if you go back to the 80s, the way that inflation was calculated is they basically said, okay, you have a dozen eggs. We're just going to look every month. What is the price of those dozen eggs? We're going to do that for all of these different consumer products in America, and that's the inflation rate. Today what they do is they have a basket, and they basically say you as an individual, what is it likely that you're buying? Maybe you buy some eggs. Maybe you buy some meat. Maybe you have a gallon of gas once a week. These different components of how you interact. And then they say, but if a price goes up too much, eggs, you're just going to stop buying eggs. You're going to substitute those eggs with some other product at the grocery store. Yeah. Maybe. But there's a lot of people who just keep buying the eggs, and they get online, and they complain about it, or they complain to their neighbor, but they're still buying the eggs. They're expensive, man. Eggs are fucking me every week. Here's the craziest part is there's two components to the. The first is that if you look at the price of eggs, they went up a lot, they've come down, but they're still very expensive, which I think is actually a great data point as to there's people who are saying, I don't care what the inflation rate is. You can tell me till you're blue in the face. Inflation's high, low, whatever this number is. That's a growth rate. All I know is that when I go to the grocery store, the bill's too high. When I go to the gas pump, the bill's too high. I don't care what the year-over-year growth is. All I know is it's too expensive. It's very different. The second thing is that corporate America cashed in. And corporate America is cashed in in a very. Very weird way. If you go and you look at eggs today, what is the most expensive eggs at the store? They're eggs that are like, we are organic, range-free, whatever crazy cockamamie thing. And I have a group chat with a couple of friends of my wife and I, couples, and it's a generalization, but it's true. All of the women are going and they're buying the eggs that are the seemingly most healthy eggs. They're also the most expensive. I go to the grocery store and I see the $15 eggs versus the. The $9 eggs. I'm saying, look. And that one doesn't have glyphosate. I don't care if it was inside of a cage or not. I don't care if they were eating grass or not. Just give me the eggs. And so I get the $9 eggs, right? But then you start to look online and you start to realize there's been all these controversies as like, are the eggs actually range-free? A lot of them. Whatever. So you not only get the inflation that's in the economy, you get the thing. So go back for a second as to the AI stuff. Starting a business new isn't just hard. It can also be terrifying. I know. Show the feeling. So much work goes into it and it can be hard to make the leap of faith. When I started my podcast, I wasn't even sure what I was doing. I was in my parents' house figuring it all out. 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So then countries are like, "Oh my God, if inflation is at 9%, if I don't raise the wages of my workers by more than 9%, that means that actually my workers are worse off this year than they were last year." Which is crazy. Can I stop you for one sec just for a question for clarification for everyone? I mean, you know, you know, there's a common thought where people say shouldn't the government basically have a ledger of every time throughout its history that they've ordered more US dollars printed and what the number was. And obviously, we know the government tends to lose a lot of data as you correctly pointed out. But if they had something that was a semblance of this, why would it not be so simple to figure out inflation by saying, "Okay, in 1971, we had, you know, we had, you know, we had X number of dollars in circulation. And now in 2026, we have X plus, you know, $11 trillion in circulation." What's the percentage difference? Why is it not that simple? Well, there are people and I'd actually put myself in the camp of if you look at inflation, Milton Friedman's famous economist, he has this thought that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. The only place that inflation can get created is in Washington, DC. If they print money, it creates inflation. If they don't print money, there's not inflation. Right? To the degree that we're talking about. So the reason why that's important is if you actually look at how many dollars are in circulation, I believe that that is a much closer representation of what real inflation is than their manipulated methodology, data collection, et cetera, of what they're reporting. So the CPI number is a government number, right? If you go around the world and you look at governments that are reporting data, when it gets bad, all of a sudden, the data looks a little bit better than what people are feeling. Now, what I will say is under Trump. Under Biden. And now against Trump, under Trump again, one of the things I find most interesting is that there is a separation of the way people think about this. There are some people, and I would put myself in the camp previously, of tell me what the numbers are. People have no clue what's actually going on. Just tell me the data and I'll look at the data, oh, people are doing better than they think they are. Oh, the stock market is doing well. Oh, inflation is not at 9% anymore. Now it's at 2.5%, whatever. But there's another camp. If you go talk to people and they say, I don't know. I don't care what the number says. I'm telling you, I can't get ahead. I'm telling you it's too expensive. I have shifted pretty aggressively into the camp of the data doesn't matter. What people feel is actually the thing that matters. Because guess what? They change their consumer behavior patterns. They change the way they vote. They change the receptivity to socialism or any of these ideas based on how they feel. They don't care what the government number is. They don't care what the alternative data says. All they know. It's either they're killing it or they're not. And can you blame them? I mean, that's human nature, right? Part of what makes this really hard, I think, for politicians and especially economists to wrap their head around is the feelings of the American people towards inflation is just as responsible to social media as it is to what the grocery bill is. Because if you go in and the grocery bill is higher, you don't like that. But guess what you also don't like? You don't like getting on Instagram and seeing that your three friends who live down the street, they're killing it. You don't like that. You don't like that. You don't like that. You don't like that. You don't like that. That's what they show you. Yeah. Of course. By the way, it doesn't matter if they rented it or that they're actually up to their ears and credit card debt or whatever. All you know is how the hell is it that somebody who is within reach of me in terms of living standard, wages, et cetera, they're killing it and I can't figure out how to pay for childcare. Right. And so that big difference is ultimately where I think people get very unhappy, right? What is unhappiness? It is ultimately the difference between everything. expectations and reality. And so if you expect that everyone is killing it and you're not, you see your ledger and you say, I don't understand how everyone else is doing this and I can't keep up. And that's where you get this unhappiness. And that's really what I think a lot of politicians are trying to kind of prey on is the unhappiness that a big part of the population has. And we're going to come back to that loop. Pomp was on about the 9% wage increase for employees, but I want to stay on this point because it's really important. I think arguably, but to me, I think it's kind of common sense, perhaps the worst effect of inflationary policy is what it's doing to, you know, biological nature of humans in this country. And what I mean by that is people are now faced with a financial decision as to whether or not they can start a family that is literally anti-evolutionary, like to where it is so expensive to have a child, which, you know, I think is like the most important thing you end up doing in life. I know you'll certainly speak for that yourself as a father. Now it's like, damn, that's a real conversation happening. That's disastrous if we don't get a lid on that and, you know, find some sort of suitable solution for the average American over the next decade. No? I'll give you three data points that I think are important for people to understand. The first is, if you used to meet someone and have a relationship, get married, have a kid, what is one of the areas that you would meet people the most frequently? Talk to our parents, our grandparents, whatever, where did everyone meet each other? The office or the bar. At work or after work. Well, guess what happened over the last decade? If you're a guy, you better not talk to anyone who was at your office. There's a lot of social pressure all of a sudden, and it comes from both sides. Men are scared to talk to women, right? But also, women, rightfully so, realize, wait a minute, the creepy dude in the cubicle next to me who used to say all this stuff and I couldn't bring up the fact that he's being creepy, I can now say something. And so you get all of these social forces that come together, and so you have a situation where one of the areas where people would meet the most often is basically taken off the table. So that's one kind of social consequence of the last decade. I'm not saying that it's good or bad, I'm just saying it's a fact that we see that. It's a pendulum swing. It's like, you don't want the bad things that would come with that, right? You want to fix that, but in fixing that, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. And yeah, shitting where you eat, whether it's at the office or places you go to, it's a fact that we see that. Whether it's at the office or places you go all the time is like a genuine fear of mine, and I speak for a lot of the people out there right now who will agree completely with what you said. That is a real problem. I met my wife. She was a reporter at Fortune Magazine. We met for a coffee one day, completely platonic, business-oriented, etc. When we met, it became very obvious during that conversation that it was going to go one of two paths. I was attracted to her, I think she was attracted to me, or we could just sit and continue to have a platonic business relationship. I suggested, hey, why don't we go to dinner tonight? Oh, that night? Oh, yeah. Listen, I never thought I was going to get married, but the second I met this girl- Oh, you got that dog in you. I was like, listen, if I'm into this, let's go to dinner tonight, right? All right. I see you. So, we went on three dates in two days. Two days. Yeah, and then I just started calling her my girlfriend. Three dates in two days. That's pretty good. Coffee, dinner, hang out the next night. Right? Like, let's go. That's right. All right, so- Did you have a bed, Ben, or was that like when you were still sleeping in the apartment? No, I was, you know, just moving around, moving and shaking. All right. But here's the problem. Three or four years after that, I don't think I would have done that. Really? 2016. Very different environment than 2018, 2019, right? So, again, like my personal experience, so I can't speak for everyone, but like for my personal experience, I don't know. Maybe I would have, maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. You got in right under the gun. Before the- Before the game started, right? I was playing the old game. So that's first. The second thing is, what is one of the number one reasons why people do not have more than two kids? They have to get a new car. Oh, another financial decision. The number of seats in the car. You can't put three kids in a normal car with the car seats usually. Right. So if you go over Reddit, Facebook groups, all the stuff, there's tons of moms and dads talking about, if I want to have a third, I have two kids already. If I want to have a third kid, I'm going to have to get a new car. Cars are expensive, right? Wow. So, again, there's a cost component to it that is not directly just childcare, you know, food. The car becomes a huge component of it. So that's another thing that's become pretty interesting. The third one, again, personal experience. My wife and I are very fortunate, right? We've had a lot of things go right in our life. We live in New York City. She ordered diapers two weeks ago. She ordered two boxes of diapers. Now, I don't know what box was, right? But she ordered them off Amazon. $150. How many diapers are in each box? Even if this is a super-sized box of diapers, I say those diapers better last a year. $150. $150 for two boxes of diapers off of Amazon. Now, again. The kid shits three times a day. Well, you don't have any kids yet. Sometimes more than that. You can go through eight, ten diapers a day, right? So you look at this and you say to yourself, wait a second here. Even if you were buying regular diapers, it is expensive. And that doesn't even get to then how many families have two incomes and have to pay for child care. Right. And so you get to this whole situation where if child care. I saw a stat recently that I think the average child care in America now is $30,000. $30,000. Imagine what they are charging at a preschool or for somebody to come over. All this stuff, right? Well, if that's $30,000, how much is that? How much money do you have to make at your job post-tax to be able to cover the child care? So again, let's just say that the average rate is, I don't know, let's say somebody pays 30% taxes. Okay. If I make 60 grand, 20 of it, ballpark, is going to taxes. That means there's only 40 left for that income of which 30 is going to child care. The person who's going to work making $60,000 only has $10,000. Right. It's unsustainable. It's unsustainable. And so you come back to, okay, if you're a young person and you have the dream of doing really, I think, three things. You want a job that can create financial stability for you currently, but at some point a family. The second thing you want is you have some desire to work on things that are meaningful to you. They're rewarding, right? So whether that is a hobby, professional work, whatever. And then the third thing is I think a lot of people, they have some sort of lifestyle that they want to. Engage in. Some people, their dream is to live in New York City. They want to live. They love the idea of being in a dense urban area where they can walk down the street and get a bagel and do all this stuff. I got a lot of friends. That sounds like a second coming of hell to them. Right. They want to live on a farm. They don't want anyone near them, right? They don't want to talk to people, all this stuff. Everyone's got a different viewpoint as to what they want to be able to do. So as part of that, now it comes down to we have a country that is split between some people want to rent, some people want to own. So one of the big, in my opinion, one of the big maybe misunderstandings is that everyone wants to own a home. I don't actually think a lot of people want to own a home, right? There are a lot of people who want to own a home, but there's a growing percentage of people who they value mobility. They value the ability to work remotely. They value the ability to pick up and go somewhere for a month, all these different components. And so we're trying to take a one size fits all lifestyle and overlay it onto 330 million Americans who all want different things. But the one thing that I do know everyone wants is people don't want to not be able to pay their bills. People don't want to feel the financial pain. And so it comes back to if you're 22 years old and you're coming out of school and you hear AI is destroying jobs, you're freaking out. Now, what we're actually seeing though, is that the companies that are AI exposed. So some companies aren't touching AI. They don't care about AI. Like who? If you're a family owned manufacturing business, so you deal with hardware, physical goods, software, you're probably got people pitching you on use AI to be better in your finance. Yeah, I've been doing this. My family's been doing this for 70 years. I'm the third generation. Take your AI and shove it up your ass right over here, like go fuck yourself. And by the way, we're doing just fine, right? Yeah. What about like Fortune 500 companies that are any like they're adopting it very rapidly. But here's the thing is that AI exposed companies, the latest data is showing that they are actually hiring more people and they're actually hiring more people. And they're actually increasing wages faster. Now, as I've dug into this data last six months or so, because one of the areas where people thought that there was going to be an absolute wipe out was software engineers. So AI can now code. So why do we need the software engineers? And people were laughing because they're like, remember when they were yelling at the journalists and everyone else, like learn to code, right? Oh, you guys want to cry because you're losing your job. Like once you just learn to code and now you're fucked. And now the joke was like, oh, the software engineers like learn to code. Well, no, you're screwed, right? What happened was there was a huge sell-off or drop in the number of software engineers, but now it has started to rapidly go the other direction. Because the cost of tokenization with AI is insane, right? What happens with AI and this, this is again, going back to, I've changed my mind on this and a huge reason was I saw it in our own businesses. So at first, maybe 18 months ago, everyone said mandate from heaven. Every company I knew, every CEO started to tell their team, use AI, use AI, use AI. What do people start doing? They start using AI. Well, guess what? AI became way more productive. Now, I actually think that there are two sides to AI. I think AI sucks at some stuff. Somebody gave me a report yesterday to make fairly big decision on the next 12 months or so headcount at a company i started looking at the report i started saying the numbers are wrong is this claude the math is wrong in this right and and i basically was looking at this person and i was like hey this business is not as good as we thought it was look at these numbers like the the margins on it whatever and then i started to do the actual math myself and i was like wait a minute no our margins are great but the you know it's the report that was wrong so i think that ai is not all that it's cracked up to be in many cases but what i do see is that it made a lot of our employees much more productive well if i have people who are now more productive i want as many of them as i can get because i'm actually getting more units of productivity per unit of labor it's like sticking steroids into a great athlete or something like that that's how you're looking at it if you have let's say a basketball team 12 people you have two on steroids and they're your most productive players first of all you're like let's go give everyone steroids right yeah very smart but on top of that you're like by the way could we play with six people on the court instead of five yes right like obviously that would be great all the rules yeah so i think that's what companies are going through is they're realizing hey for the right people who know how to use these tools they're becoming more productive and so you're seeing this hiring happen now the other piece of this story i think especially for young people is young people's brains are not in cement right how many young people are sitting around and they're like oh some new technology i don't know anything at my job let me use this thing and they start to adopt it so the number one thing you can do to insulate yourself job wise in my opinion if you become the ai guy or girl no one's firing you if you work at a fortune 500 company and you know how to use ai go find your boomer boss and be like i'm the guy i understand how to use ai you might get a promotion because they're going to be like oh we need ai ai you know i saw the uh headline it's supposed to make us more productive you know ai you could spell ai oh okay should come over here and do that alan iverson very well yeah do that do this like ai magic or something and make me look good right type stuff so i think that again there's this bifurcation to it now the thing that's bifurcation the thing that scares the hell out of me is getting that report with the math wrong right or i have some folks who work at some of our companies who will send me an email or some sort of report on something and i will literally respond to them and say did you think before you sent this because i started reading i'm like the whole thing is ai and you you might as well have just like thrown chalk in the air and hope that it landed in you know the right thing on the board right because 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family run restaurant with home base you can schedule your team track time run payroll and manage hiring from one easy app so you can spend less time chasing timesheets and more time running the business your customers love more than 150 000 small businesses already use home base to keep their teams on track start free at joinhomebase.com homebase built for small businesses that do it all and so i've thought i have not done this but i've thought about banning inside of our companies anyone sending me an ai report you can use ai to get smarter have to do some of the work whatever but if you send me something that a human did not put the final stamp on i'm gonna freak out right because it isn't a magic bullet for everything it is a tool and so you started off this conversation with it can do things that humans can't do we forget excel replaced entire departments inside of companies of course it did yes there used to be people right if you go watch like a movie from the 1910s yes they used to have entire rooms full of people sitting there with ledgers and they were writing down all this stuff excel got rid of all those people now companies are bigger than ever they're worth more money than ever people make more money than ever right all these things happened and so what really ends up happening is we're going to take people who ai is replacing some of their jobs because that's happening to a degree and they now simply are going to shift to other places in the economy but i don't think we can bet the economy on that what we actually need is we need the companies who are adopting ai to say hey this is making my employees more productive which it looks like it is i'm going to hire more people and when that happens then i think that people start to change their mind as i did and say you know what this ai thing let's get this in every single company in america because that means actually we're going to have more jobs not less jobs all right before i go into that with you can you go back to the literal point you were making that i got you off where you were talking about how they had been raising wages by nine percent and then suddenly they're like i need to cut people oh nobody was raising wages by nine percent but they felt like they would need to so they're like that meaning i'm just gonna integrate ai and then we started to get into it but like it led to rising costs of ai itself and they're like well i think there's two there's two different eras so again i look at a lot of things that people knew before 2020 are not relevant anymore we can get into what some of those are but yeah i think let's do that i think that business job market economy inflation all stuff you have to look at pre-2020 post-2020 the post-2020 economy was inflation's out of control i have to either raise the wages of my employees to such a level that it is right is growing faster than inflation or they're falling behind so what do companies start doing they're like well i can't raise every single person's wage at my company ten percent or more so they start to lay off people so in 2022 you saw asset prices came down interest rates went up there's a lot of layoffs and so coming out of 2022 you're starting at a lower baseline right and so that's where it happens to coincide with the rise of ai chat gpt comes out all this stuff and so now you get this massive productivity gain but again you were coming off of some of these companies had laid off people had become a little bit leaner now one of the things i find most interesting is that there's a ton of companies right now that are laying people off and they're blaming ai they it's not because of ai why is it because they didn't do the layoffs in 2022 and 2023 when they should have so they've just been bloated organizations like take for example oh so they're wait so you're saying they're like going to shareholders like yeah we delay people off because of ai but it's really because they up let's talk about block and twitter okay elon musk buys twitter he goes in i think they slash something like you know they had 6 000 employees whatever number was down to like 2 000. yeah they fired a lot i mean they just they just fired tons of people and everyone was freaking out products probably better than ever usage is at all-time highs all these things happen right so that objectively in hindsight was a bloated organization the same person who's running that company now is running block they just did a massive layoff i think laid off like 2 000 people and they blamed ai but they had like doubled or tripled the number of users post the pandemic during that time period and so i don't think it has anything to do with ai i think ai is a scapegoat for them to do the thing that they should have done which is you have to right-size your organization because you got too many people right you you over hired and you mismanaged this thing right optics by the way if i was the ceo of one of these companies would i have the intestinal fortitude and the personal integrity to just tell people i screwed up i hired too many people we got to right-size this whatever without hitting the easy button of blame ai right because they'll say you first if you do that again right so so again people are people are operating from the perspective of what is rational from their views right so if you look at the job market what we now have is we have tons of open roles we have roles that we previously thought were going to get smashed accelerating again we have the unemployment rate between 20 and 24 year olds coming down substantially yeah you said it went from 9 to 5.5 yes now is that 20 to 24 years are you talking about the unemployment rate of people seeking employment or just overall from the population i don't know what it's clarified as it's probably people seeking it's probably people seeking employment because if they're not seeking employment they're usually taking out of the unemployment like the labor market um but if you're 20 24 years old pretty much everyone's seeking employment right there's not many 20 24 year olds who just say hey you know what i'm just gonna kick back and not uh not not get a job well here's another another question because i haven't looked at this data closely at all so it'd be good to actually like learn about this some more so we can actually put hard numbers with it but like i'm also thinking about that from the perspective of this is now the wave of young generation that came out of like they were in early high school and stuff when covid hit and things like that and the world change and so there's also a change in how many people are opting to go to college versus going to more like trade type of jobs which are certainly in demand right now and everything as far as i've been able to see is that also possibly a part of the higher employment number meaning like there are jobs that there are employment opportunities that young people are looking for now that they weren't even considering five years ago there's a lot of stuff happening in the job market some of it is ai related some of it's not so for example how many people you know the famous stat of like kids want to be youtubers not astronauts or whatever right okay fine but how many people make a living in creative fields that there was a democratization two years ago and now it's like oh my god it's like oh my god it's like oh my god it's like oh sure podcast youtube music all this kind of stuff right so that's like one whole piece but inside of a company it goes back to there was not anything to do with social media 15 years ago right now there's those roles but guess what else i have people who work at some of our companies they are young people who i explicitly seek out their opinion on things because they are across the political spectrum they're younger and guess what they do i tell liberals i tell people all the time if you're 22 to maybe 28 or so you're willing to do something that i'm not willing to do anymore go out i want you out in the streets on the weekends at night etc and i want you meeting people because guess what that's what i was doing when i was that age i was going to the networking events or going out with other people i thought you know were successful smart etc and i was able to meet all the people that i was meeting and i was able to meet all these incredible people who now have become very successful i'm married i got family now i'm in my late 30s i'm not going to the club on friday night you're not but unfortunately not but if i have people who work with me who are going and doing that stuff that's a huge part of an advantage that we can gain because we're still meeting them those people as an organization and so i'll go to young people all the time and say who are the five smartest people you know that you're your age i've never heard of the people that they say so it's not like oh there's the founder of this company blah blah whatever it's some random person i'm like what are you talking about like this person who they don't run a company they don't do it whatever and they're like no no they're good at abcd whatever and i'll meet them i'll be like you know what that person is really smart they're 24 years old you know let's keep an eye on what that person wants to do in the future and so again it goes back to when you're in your 20s you don't want to try to have the same advantages that the 45 year old has because they probably got more resources more experience better network etc you want to find the thing that you're really good at and i think that there's a lot of folks who they're looking at ai as the boogeyman but actually if you're a young person in particular you should be the earliest adopters of this stuff because it's going to make you you know the teflon don of your organization because you got the skill set and experience and knowledge that frankly the boomers they're not going to go they don't have it i also think that's why like if i had to boil it down to one thing because i've known you a long time and i met you when you were already successful but like you definitely really leveled up since then as well but i think the thing that's made you most successful in business if there was one thing to boil it down to is you ask a lot of questions and you ask the questions sometimes that you know in the old carl sagan saying of like kids get laughed at sometime after kindergarten and by the time they're in 12th grade they don't ask these questions anymore i feel like you actually ask those things of course and that is there's something that i learned from that and i think everyone out there could definitely learn from not just for business by the way just like in life to like figure some shit out but you're laying it out because you go to a 23 year old who has a totally different life experience than you and you're like well you're going to do some things that i don't want to do anymore and so who are these people what do you think what is it and even if it's something that sounds virtually retarded to you you're like maybe it's not let's let let's empower i'll take it a step further there's a lot of people inside of many organizations what they they never want to talk about politics or local policy all this type of i want people who have a diversity of thought that work in our organizations i want some people who they love trump i want some people who hate trump i want some people who lean right lean left or centrist independent everything right just on the just political lens there are times where i know what let's say somebody on the right thinks and i have no clue what the other side would look at this and so i will go to the person in our organization and i will say this topic what are your friends saying and i always ask what are your friends saying because now they don't feel like they're the one who has to counteract whatever somebody else is saying but they will be very transparent so mom donnie is a great example when the rise of mom donnie mom donnie was happening every rich person i knew in new york city was saying exactly what you think they were saying this guy's dangerous this is crazy this is blah blah blah whatever and some people were telling you to run right the uh uh that's not a denial yeah there was a lot of people who asked me a lot of stuff um i was uh um paying attention to uh to this whole thing because one of the things that i thought was uh was fascinating is that very early on i was like trump and mom donnie are the same person they understand the pulse of the people they understand how to use social media to communicate they somehow have used what is a fairly elitist position to convince the popular uh kind of constituency that they are like them i would say trump's a genius because he convinced people he's got a gold toilet but he's like a farmer in iowa right like how does that happen right mom donnie same thing mom donnie comes from a very successful family but he is walking on the streets and he's like hey let's go take it to the man and so again they have different policies they disagree but that's actually why they like each other is because i think they realize they are like a mirror image aoc i think is pretty similar as well she understands how to use social media she understands like populist viewpoint and she's able to communicate on social media in a way that really rallies folks up now compare that to maybe other politicians on the right or left who don't know how to do that stuff yeah i think mom donnie is like the next evolution of like an aoc though i'm talking just strictly like political style because he is so measured yes with how he says things he's not radical yeah you can totally disagree with his policies and call the policies radical like i don't think socialists should be you know that's the type of people we should be electing but like for example some of those campaign videos that were long form videos as well where he goes to the district and he's like hey i noticed you know your district flipped like 40 points for donald trump so did you vote for trump yes i voted for trump okay i have some political differences with him but i'm just curious what what made you do that and he listened to these people and these people gave them great answers they're like well i was doing okay financially and then biden came in and i wasn't so i voted for the other one and you he actually makes sense by the way made a ton of sense and so again like disagree with his policies if you want to but you have to respect how he did it even how deep we were just looking at it how he addressed like the israel thing during the campaign but the other day he was being hounded on it like you must be anti-semitic because you don't support like israel or whatever and he goes i actually did what how do you say yeah yeah but he's like i differentiate whether or not i have to cast a allegiance to a government that i believe commits genocide and ethic cleansing versus a very separate group of people who happen to be a race that shares a race with that government who have nothing to do with that who i'm proud to call my constituents in new york i was like well here the reason why i say uh the radical communication is i think that um the outcome that an aoc wanted is like people with pitchforks in the street you know freaking out i think that the message that frankly trump and mom donny both delivered to a certain subset of the population is optimism and i guess and i think that yes i agree trump went to a bunch of people and was like inflation is too high these people are killing you government overreach you know uh they're starting wars all over the place but and his message was like i'm going to give you hope that a certain version of america is what is going to return make america great again literally yes the slogan mom donny did the same thing for a different constituency but he basically presented a message of optimism to them now these two groups don't agree on almost anything right right but i agree on one thing but yeah but but that is ultimately the the battle i think right and so if you go back to ai now what we have is we got people who aren't in either one of those camps who control technology and we're going to find out what exactly they want to do with this technology now what i will say maybe one last thing i'll say about the positives of ai which i think is very important okay let's use education healthcare and finance as the three examples okay if i said to you there is a eight-year-old child we want them to be as smart as possible what can we do from an education perspective that is going to give them the best shot of being intelligent and learning at eight years old any age the number one thing that we have learned throughout history across studies across just human experience is you give people a one-on-one private education experience one-on-one tutoring works to get people people smarter. So what happens if in school and you're behind, they give you a tutor. What happens if you are excelling? They give you a tutor, right? What do rich people really care about? What is the, uh, the ratio of students, teachers inside the classroom? They then even will go as far as to do one-on-one tutoring outside of school, et cetera, right? So one-on-one tutoring or one-on-one, um, uh, kind of insights works for education in healthcare. What is the thing that every single rich person wants? One-on-one healthcare. They want a private doctor who is focused on them. They want as much information as possible, but the private one-on-one healthcare experience everyone believes is going to lead to better health outcomes. If we could give every person in America a doctor and it was their only patient, you think they'd probably be better? Of course. So it works. Education works in healthcare. What about in finance? Same exact thing. If you had one-on-one personalized insights, that would happen. What AI is doing is it is now, allowing companies to take that one-on-one experience and provide it at scale. So I cannot speak to education or healthcare. I can give you a couple of companies I've seen. I'm an investor in a company that does it in a education space, uh, called synthesis. Basically they've created games that are AI driven and students play them, but it's being customized with AI to their personal, where are they from a learning perspective? How do they learn all this kind of stuff? There's another school, which I have no affiliation with called alpha school, similar thing. hours a day they use these products to learn and then the rest of the day they go and they do friendly cool stuff right they they work on uh learning business or they go play sports or do whatever is there a human touch that's lost with that though yes and no right on one hand is there a human touch in a classroom with 32 students and the teacher is trying to very fair argument you know they just can't provide one-on-one experience so like there's always trade-offs in these things where i actually think what we want is we want both we want one-on-one tutoring essentially in education for students for a period of time of the day and then we want them playing with other kids or interacting with adults or whatever so it doesn't need to be either or we wanted to be both right health care there's a lot of companies now that are showing up with things like you know the dexa scans and all that stuff but also chat gpt launched chat gpt health and so you can go in and you can upload all of your health data which again some people like to do some people don't sam altman will review it all and it will then start to help guide you now i'll give you a a personal story about the power of ai and health care the power of ai my wife and i uh well she got pregnant uh contrary to popular belief i can't get pregnant well what do you say it's a person who can birth or something like that now listen there's a lot of different terms flying around if people want to attack me uh me believing that women get pregnant is uh i won't attack you at all i love that yeah where i come from that's common sense right um all right so she goes for a scan and uh we were having twins and in this scan um oh you i was there you went to zone coverage right from like hold on one hold on you're gonna love this i am there for this scan and while we are in the room the doctor is doing the you know wand over her stomach and all of a sudden you can just kind of tell when somebody starts like not just being chill and so she starts like scanning a little bit faster a little bit more aggressive whatever and starts like looking around the room all the stuff she puts the machine down she turns on the lights and she says we need to have a serious conversation you don't want to hear we need to have a serious conversation when your pregnant wife is at the doctor and the doctors did a scan that's not the way to open that combo doc we sit down and the doctor says to us you have twins which we already know but these twins do not have a membrane wall in between the two twins so the twins are actually in the same like mem uh membrane area and so they're sharing a placenta and they're sharing the membrane sac very very high risk to the point where the doctor says to us at this point most people in your position will terminate the pregnancy if you've ever been around anyone who has been pregnant that is like the most devastating conversation you could have with a doctor we leave my wife is incredible upset i'm like what just happened right all this stuff to my wife's credit she goes home and she takes the scan and she's looking at it with her human eyes and saying there's like this line in between the like what is that so she uploads it to one of the ai systems and she asks what do you see here and the ai system says we see two twins in two membrane sacs sharing one placenta and my wife's like can you explicitly point to where you know i mean like ask like multiple thing questions in this long story short is the ai identifies that there's two separate membranes does share a placenta but two separate membranes that takes the risk from like the most risky to there's some risk but like there's plenty of people who go through this not a problem you know you'll be fine so my wife then takes the scan and she circles what the ai told her draws the biggest arrow i've ever seen and uploads it into the brain and she's like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die and she's like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die into the doctor's system and says just out of curiosity can you tell me what this is just out of curiosity is a hard line right there the doctor calls her and literally says some version of i am so sorry i don't know what i was looking at before that is correct that is the membrane oh my god i hope you fired that doctor you know i apologize but whatever again we've heard story after story of ai yeah that's useful analyzing you know x-rays or doing all the stuff whatever my personal experience going through that was without ai i doubt my wife and i would have terminated the pregnancy but how many parents would have yeah would we have gone through that entire pregnancy thinking that there was this huge risk or whatever right and so you look at that you say well one area where i am 100 positive ai is going to be better than humans is doing something as simple as analyzing x-rays scans etc in health care i agree with that right so guess what though i don't want an ai doctor managing my wife's pregnancy or me going through a surgery or anything i want a human augmented by the ai i want both right i want like double coverage on this thing yes so in my head i know that education works i know health care it works so i started paying attention to a lot of finance and i started asking myself how can i use these tools to again i want a human augmented by the ai and so i started using chat gpt i started using claude etc and what i started with was i used to take screenshots out of my laptop and i would go to my computer and i would take screenshots of all my accounts and upload them and then i would ask questions how to get my tax rate down you know what's the concentration levels or correlations in my portfolio all these like regular questions long story short we eventually got to the point where it was so frustrating to constantly be uploading screenshots that we built a product to go do this so then i went from i am somebody who is a user of this stuff and somebody who is watching other people use this stuff to now i have to think through the design of these systems i have to think through how they work so the way that the product works today it's called cf o sylvia and you come in and you attach all your accounts so ai is not valuable unless you give it the context so you right you give it read access to your bank account your brokerage your crypto account your credit cards you upload all the private stuff private investments cars collectibles etc and you start talking to it but guess what i've experienced it has found things that my accountant financial advisor cfo etc did not find all right hold on a minute though go ahead what about the slippery slope of this you know we're living in the future some guy you know he's going he's he's in a marriage he's not that happy about it he wants ai to help him with his finances and everything and then the ai finds an ashley madison account and says i'm going to tell your wife about this unless you do x y and z like you see how something like that could be sensitized to turn against you 100 right my response to stuff like that is twofold one with a lot of these systems they're everyone is so worried about that that actually you end up having so many controls that people are actually advocating for the opposite they're like hey can you take the governor off can you you know a good example cfo sylvia does not touch your money so we can't move money we can't execute a trade we can't do any of that stuff one of the number one feature requests is can it touch my money can it move my stuff right we don't want to do that today because there's a lot of risks associated with that and we like being the insights layer not the actual one moving the money at the moment but people are actually asking us for the opposite not hey can you make this less risky they wanted to be more risky so that's first the second thing is ultimately the ai is going to have to do is only doing the things that you either give it access to or it is telling i'll put in air quotes truth if it's accurate right so at the end of the day if you upload a bunch of accounts and you're on whatever ashley madison or going to you know uh porn sites or going to the strip club or whatever i don't think a lot of people are like oh if you deliver me the insight that you know i'm spending too much at the strip club there's kind of two responses it's like on one hand like are you spending too much money that strip club like somebody should tell you because you're not telling your financial advisor your wife doesn't know all this stuff like you're like you as an individual actually probably want to know that information what you don't want is you want to tell your wife and so i think that's where you get into this weird world of well the same thing could happen with the financial advisor the financial advisor's got your credit card statements and financial advisor comes to you and says hey by the way i see you've been going to the strip club i'm going to go and tell your wife yeah but i could beat the shit out of him i can't beat the shit out of an ai you know what i mean that's true now here's the number one thing that we see so i talked about education where people get the one-on-one education they learn faster health care better outcome we actually have a lot of people that are going to be like oh my god i'm going to have the data that the people who regularly use sylvia whether you use sylvia or use some other ai system whatever they grow their net worth faster faster than the people who don't use this stuff. And some of it is because if you're paying attention, you're using a product, you're probably leaning into it more, right? You're saying, Hey, I care about my finances. I'm checking my net worth. I'm actively managing this. But the other side is that you have superhuman intelligence. And so think about our whole conversation for whether we're talking about a company, an individual in the job market, education, healthcare, finance, whatever, we now have superhuman intelligence. And so that intelligence is incredibly valuable. It's why these companies are becoming so valuable. They're growing so quickly is everyone has scoured the world for centuries, trying to find the smartest people to help them. I want the smartest doctor. I want the smartest teacher. I want the smartest financial expert. I want the person who can help my company grow the fastest. I want the best engineer, whatever. If that is now in software, are there downsides? 100% trade-offs 100%. But there is going to be insatiable demand to get access to superhuman intelligence to then go and apply it. To whatever the thing is you care about. This episode sponsored by Homebase. Homebase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With Homebase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing timesheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses use Homebase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. Homebase, built for small businesses that do it all. Oh, oh, oh, O'Reilly. Check engine, ABS, or maintenance light on? Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE certified master technicians. And if you need help, we can recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriscan today. Auto Parts. This is a little bit of a tangential question here, but I'm just, it's like it's in the back of my head listening to you talk about all this stuff at scale and all that because, like, you're a really, really pure business guy. But as someone who objectively, like, if you wanted to retire tomorrow, you are good. You've earned a lot for yourself, had a lot of success. You got the great wife, the great family. Like, that's clearly your priority, which is an awesome thing and all that. Like, outside of, like, hey, I just want to set a great example for my kids or something like that, what drives you to constantly be on the cutting edge of wherever things are going? Like, do you want to be Jeff Bezos or do you just get off on the action of it? Like, what is it? I think that most people who… Are good at business. They have one defining feature that I find across all industries is they fundamentally believe they're helping their customer. So, if you think of Bezos, right, I'm sure he's done stuff I don't even know he's done, right, that we're all like, hey, I don't like that or I'm worried about this, whatever. Sending dick pics to people, you know, like, there's, you know, that type of stuff all the way to the technology, whatever. By the way, if you had a conversation, they're probably not proud of some of the stuff they've done themselves, right? Sure. So, okay, put that aside. But that guy in particular created the ability for me to press a button on my phone and something shows up the next day. Oh, it's amazing. It's like a modern miracle, right? So, you go through all these companies and you say, like, ultimately, they are net positives. It doesn't come without trails, but they're net positives. What drove them? Almost every single one of them. I mean, Bezos constantly talked about in every single public interview, every single writing, et cetera, was we are obsessed with the customer. If you go and you look at somebody like an Elon Musk, like, this guy's a maniac. He's nuts, yeah. He literally is. He's tying his pay to getting a million people on Mars. He's already rich. He ain't going to, he's not going to be upset. Yeah, he's not going to be upset if he doesn't get this. He's a trillionaire. But if you think about this, right, is self-driving cars, something like a Neuralink is literally helping disabled people. You've got the boring company with traffic. Like, all these things are very much in service. And so, one of the things I've learned in my career, which I think is for people who do not spend time with these types of folks or do not spend time inside of a business, I don't know very many people who have built a business. I don't know very many people who have built successful large businesses who did not make other people's life better. Like, the service of improving somebody else's life is really what creates the value. There's a difference, and I can't know without knowing some of the guys, others I can observe, and I kind of know the answer. But the difference is the people who actually lead with that as the goal versus that as just a consequence of the things they do along the way. Oh, yeah, by the way, we help people. But in reality, they're like, yeah, fuck those people. Like, that's a Peter Thiel. But here's the thing, right? And we talk about Peter. No. Well, first name basis. I would say that even if somebody is like, screw these people, they still have to help somebody in order to make the business successful. So if you go to whatever, take the company that you hate the most, right, or you think is the most egregious about this, I probably could still point to whose lives are they improving because ultimately that's what elicits the economic value being transferred. The only way that you pay someone for something is emailing. Either they make your life better or you're fearful of something. There's only two ways that money really transacts in an economy. Yeah, but I think that that's a really slippery slope when you're trying to find that with any company, though, because like Amazon aside, I can point to a lot of things that are amazing there, right? So I'm not going to pick on that right now. It's things that aren't, but like what was created is objectively amazing. But then you look at a company like Palantir is being subsidized by the Bureau fucking deep state to basically surveil people and, you know, kill kids all over the world when they fucking fail. I don't think that that that you can say, well, but, you know, we have some data on some terrorists. So there's a good thing. The tradeoff is like the scales are like this. Well, so let's take Palantir as an example. I'm not an investor. I know people who used to work there. I don't know a lot of people who still work there now, but I know some of the people who were involved early on, et cetera. And I would also as a contextual point, I was in the military. So I've seen some of the other technologies, et cetera, right? I don't think I ever. Right. Right. I was in the military explicitly was like this piece of information is coming from Palantir, but I'm sure just given that they were kind of in their heyday. Right. I'm sure it's at some point I interact with the data. If you go and you look at a company like that, my guess is that they are responsible for 10, 20, 100 X more of saving lives than actually hurting people. Now, the one thing that, again, there's always these tradeoffs is, well, what about what is necessary in order to save lives? So go to. The extreme of China. You can't go anywhere without walking down the street and there's cameras everywhere and there's this whole surveillance state, whatever. Right now, Brett Bear, the Fox guy, I saw a clip online. He was in China to, I think, interview somebody or whatever. And while they're doing the like live feed, he goes, yeah, and we just got a ticket because we double parked for two minutes and there was a camera, saw them double parked and it sent a ticket to their phone. Right. Like you. You've seen the guys in New York City walk down and they're like giving the parking ticket. Somebody runs out. Hoboken. Hoboken. Right. Wherever. Right. In China, they just do it by camera and just comes to your phone. They don't even need a person to go do it. Right. So like the surveillance is incredible there compared to the US. Now, you know, what's fascinating. I don't know if you've seen this. Who is the guy, Adam, like jumper or something that the he interviews. No jumper. Yeah. This guy. He interviews a lot of like athletes and porn stars. I saw a clip. He somehow got a group of the way that the clips insinuated criminals in San Francisco came on a podcast and they were saying that they can no longer steal cars because of the flock security system. So flock is a company that's got these like it was just here at these private cameras. They have drones. They have all this stuff with these kids were saying is like, yeah, we don't we can't steal cars anymore because the second we steal the car. The cameras got us. They got a drone overhead. Like we're overmatched by technology. But here's the thing, Pop. That's that's how they creak the door open to this stuff. They say, look at and I'll go way more extreme than stealing cars. They say, look, we solved 100,000 homicides over the last two years. That's 100,000 people that would be dead. And objectively, that's great. But if the cost of that is to enslave a billion people 10 years from now, that's not. So here goes back to right. The first thing I always remind people is. And it's hard because whenever you see news, you're always like, oh, my God, you know, this is my reaction. We probably don't hear about many of good and bad things that occur. Exactly. I agree. So we're operating already kind of in the dark of a lot of the really, really sensitive stuff. Now, we do hear sometimes the recent plot for UFC 250. There was these five guys who supposedly were going to go and fly, you know, drones with explosives and they were sniper positions, all this stuff and everything they were coordinating on. I think first. I messaged, then signal and stuff how they get caught. One of their moms turned them in. You can have all technology in the world. Your mom finds out. Sometimes you still need the human element. Right. So we have intelligence agencies and police and undercover agents and, you know, trying to recruit spies and like there's still this whole apparatus that is not tech that is needed to enforce rules, protect people, et cetera. But if you go back to, for example, just use flock in San Francisco, I don't live in San Francisco. I go to San Francisco sometimes. I like the idea of cameras being everywhere, right? I like my privacy. i like the idea of people not stealing cars though yes right and so there's this balance now bring it closer to home in new york city new york city maybe is the most surveilled american city it is right i believe that's statistically true like probably right i mean you walk there's these crazy cameras all stuff right i choose to live there right i could not live there and does that make it right or good or not whatever well like i don't want like a terrorist attack i don't want you know tons of crime if there's like a shooting like let's catch them at the same time like do i love the idea of like walking down the street and probably having a picture of my face taken every five seconds how about when you go to the airport now thief and i just got back from italy you know you don't have to show your passport anymore they just scan your face and there's some fucking company behind that doing that they know everything about yeah but here's the thing go back to remember the united healthcare shooter yeah dude he got to another state before he was caught and there was a couple of videos like there was a video of the shooting itself i think there was a video of him like entering central park or coming out of central park or something on the bike but it's not like hey you know we got the facial recognition stuff now whatever now i don't know this to be true but do you think that they caught him because of the mcdonald's facial recognition have you have you explored this i haven't explored that but that's not what i would have guessed so maybe i i but one theory like one theory that again i don't know it would not surprise me though is he went to mcdonald's he ordered the story is that the woman at the cash register thought he looked like the potential shooter and called it in right if i told you that he went and he ordered at the digital kiosk which has a camera in it and somehow they were able to using facial recognition software realized that he was at that place and called local police and get there would surprise you wouldn't surprise me wouldn't surprise me no right so again it goes back to the first time i walked into a mcdonald's i saw the digital kiosk i was i ain't playing with this nonsense right and i went to the human now when i go to mcdonald's i go to the digital kiosk and i've learned what i want to order where it is i'm you know fairly uh uh able to navigate it and then i see this camera pointed at me and every time i said to myself where's that going right why they need a camera on my face right i love technology i think it's amazing it's got us to this point in the world like they've never invented the wheelbarrow they've never invented the wheelbarrow imagine where we are right like if that didn't end up happening but you still have to like i know you've read all these books too where art kind of mimics life but you read the 1984s you read the brave new worlds and you look at the patterns that form and it's like yes we could see a lot of scenarios even if it's something as simple as a digital kiosk with a camera at mcdonald's which i haven't been in mcdonald's in fucking 20 years but either way like a lot of it's like you know that little things like that little death by a thousand cuts if you will can lead to statistics looking good on certain things that everyone could agree on in the short term that fucking kills everyone in the long term and like it'll get to a point where people could look at maybe a time like the western frontier post-civil war which was if you ever seen even the show 1883 brutal right motherfuckers would go take a piss and get bit by a rattlesnake and they they're dead right like i wouldn't want to go back to that but you will people could live in a time where they go i would much rather you know i guess taking a piss is a bad example but i'd much rather like die standing up in a way well and have freedom than live in a feeling of like i'm being watched all the time and i can't do anything i'm at home and you know i'm just jerking off the past the time i grew up in north carolina i was in the military right so you're a fake new york fan hold on a second okay so there's also a bunch of people i know who cops firemen uh yeah they work inside of a jail etc there are some portion i don't know what the exact number is but some portion of my friends or people that i've met throughout my life who what you just described this like surveillance state all this stuff scares the hell out of them guess what they do they opt out they go and they live on a farm somewhere and they're just like leave me alone i want to go do my thing whatever right that is an option for some portion of people now it goes back to the economic conversation how many people can afford to live in a farm and they're just like leave me afford to do that right can they find it how do they work if that's what they're doing you know all this kind of stuff right so that's one component the other side is there's some people who i think are on the extreme of i don't give a shit what you're doing i want to live in some place new york city san francisco wherever and they don't even think about it they don't even realize there's cameras you know on the street corner whatever it's the people in the middle that i think actually spend the most time thinking about this stuff because either because they haven't or don't want to opt out but they realize the trade-off is i want to live in x y and z city but i know that i'm giving up some degree of this yeah and so it comes back to what is the counter argument right like what is the thing that we wish would happen and i think that's what society is really struggling with right now right is do we want to live in a new york city where there's no cameras in today's day and age probably not probably not but who's got the controls and where can it go so take it a step further one of the things that they have done in new york city for some camera not all cameras but some cameras for some cameras for some cameras for some cameras is that you can go on a public website and you can actually see that camera now on one hand that's great because you can see what's going on also today you uh the new york knicks parade is going on and people love looking at how many people are out there all useful to have cameras for that for sure yeah other side of that is do you want anyone in the world be able to tap into a random camera and see you on that camera as you're walking down the street whatever what are they doing with that information all right that's right so you get into this weird like what is public transparency versus how could it be used and sometimes it's not just even the fact that the camera is there it's then where is it going how can people use that what are the rules how long is it stored for you know there's a lot of things in this we haven't even talked yet about when it's used incorrectly so how many people are sitting inside of a prison somewhere didn't do something and some piece of technology was weapon weaponized against them and then they get freed later and it's you know i don't know the the cop uh misused the dna kit or something right you know whatever the problem is and then they get freed later and it's you know whatever the thing is so i generally look at this as technology is a net positive for society even something where maybe i've become much more uh stringent in my thoughts about social media and how it is really uh negatively impacting a large portion of the population i still think it's a net positive it allows you can you explain that whole thing there are two addictions in this country that i think are going to become massive scandals among the people one is social media if i look at your phone or my phone how many hours a day do you sit in front of a screen mine i looked recently over 11 and a half hours now that includes both my phone my computer my ipad everything right but that means that for i don't know two-thirds of the time i'm awake i'm in front of a screen yeah on one hand it affords me the ability to make a living for me and my family it allows me to meet all kinds of people learn do all this stuff right think of books as maybe a example i love reading physical books and i go back and forth sometimes i'll go through these huge spurts and only read physical books but then i'm like well you know what like watching this youtube video is actually really valuable i'm learning a lot from it or watching you know a podcast or listening to an audiobook or whatever and so like the technology is actually accelerating the learning so i want to use this stuff yes i also doom scroll on whatever app all the time like an idiot and like a monkey right and you know waste a bunch of time and get probably brain rot so there's this like balance of even just the screen the other one and i know you talked to uh lewis ruggiero oh he was sports gambling sports gambling right but again it goes back to the same exact thing that gives you access to information about a thing you care about sports you're getting fed an ad in front of your face that's like hey give me your money and you know bet on balls or strikes at the baseball game yeah so you look at this stuff and you say there's always two sides to the technology if we go back to let's just talk about artificial intelligence from a software perspective i think that the positive effects drastically outweigh the negative effects maybe because it's so early that we have not yet seen all the negative effects okay but i also people may be surprised i'm very skeptical of the people who control a lot of this technology yeah because i think that we do not yet fully understand how much like finger on the scale that's right is going on on the back end that's right i think we will learn over time but to me that is it's not going to be a problem for us to be able to do that because we're going to be able to learn over time but to me that's right is going to be a problem for us to be able to do that because you said to me what are the things that i wish i knew well like when somebody asked certain questions what happens let's let's use the iran uh school where a bunch of children were killed was ai used to fire the missile we still don't know that for sure right based on everything we've been told both from the government and from the ai companies ai it was not an autonomous system right the ai did not like press the final button to fire the missile what we have not been told did any of the government and the ai companies tell us that it was not an autonomous system did ai identify the target yeah that specific building did ai identify that area did ai identify that region did ai inform the person who pressed the button who's ai i mean there's a lot of questions there right now i do think a lot of people say to themselves well if a human pressed the button that final like approval of the human pressing the the fire missile button okay that would be a very that's a very different situation than an autonomous system doing it but like dude humanoid rope are gonna have guns on the battlefield. - Yeah. - We have guns. have drones right now with explosives that are flying around in the russia ukraine conflict right two of those guys in here talking about that so you look at this stuff and you say uh i don't know you've probably seen the videos of the drone tracking the soldier who's like running around the tank right yep and it's like soldier yeah and it's like look that video is really a timeless lesson throughout history everyone tries to get a technology advantage over their opponent yeah but what happens if that drone sees a farmer walking through the field it's actually no different than the soldier in iraq or afghanistan who sees somebody we're going through a few you know what i mean but i think people have a very different reaction when it's a machine versus human yeah now there's also though because we're gonna really talk about in a little bit like some of the people who have their quote-unquote fingers on the trigger these days with this but you the conversation on this with certain people changed a lot over the years like i remember i was reading everything i could get my hands on in 2018 and 2019 on ai and listening to everything i could get my hands on i remember like the first maybe it was like the first hundred episodes like lex friedman did a lot of it was talking to some of the smartest people in the world about ai and it was very very interesting stuff came out of the academic world absolutely and you had guys like elon musk and he was not the only one you know publicly and then through written word and books and stuff like that when he was asked for comment on things absolutely sounding the alarm on where this can go and everything and it's not to say like he completely has come off that at this point but then you know at some point it just turns into well he's a part of the war now too he's making grok he's doing xai he's integrating that with spacex to try to do interplanetary you know whatever and it's like well what changed because you were the same guy who was going speechless years ago on different stages or i think he even talked about it with joe rogan like back in 2018 where he was like yeah it's a huge problem i tried to tell obama about it he kind of got it you know like why is that conversation changed so let's use elon as an example yeah this is my external view this is to his evolution he realizes ai is going to be powerful yet dangerous he realizes that most of the companies that are building it were like deep mind google then bought deep mind etc right he's friends with sergey in particular but i think sergey and larry from google from google he goes to them it's like this is really crazy you know you should be careful but whatever didn't he have a falling out with them over that i believe so yeah that is ultimately the start of open ai yeah the reason why open ai got started at least my understanding of it is it was supposed to be open source artificial intelligence and it was supposed to be open source artificial intelligence and it was supposed to come at it from a like ethical safe you know approach and the reason why they made it a non-profit and open source was there should be no economic you know gain associated with it and it should be transparently kind of auditable by other people so open ai he's very good at naming things right but open ai uh gets started at some point as human nature takes over some of the people involved seem to say hey we can make a lot of money here and so open ai becomes like a company of its own right and for-profit ai and so now they're going through this transition what did he do with that company again by the way like he with open ai he divested for i forget what it was he was involved if i remember correctly i think he put uh like 100 million dollars yeah yeah he was very involved and then he wasn't and he was like the chairman he was recruiting some of the early people like like it was basically his non-profit and he had these people helping him build it and they were really doing the day-to-day and he was kind of like the the benefactor and then it became sam's and then i think that what happened um there's a couple of details that have come out in part of the lawsuit stuff it seems like all of a sudden he was like hey these people are really smart i have tesla tesla needs help with ai and so one of the things elon has done is like he just tries to attract the smartest people at any of his companies and he'll take like the tesla you know guy who's good at manufacturing and bring him to spacex for a day and say hey you know fix the manufacturing problem and you're an expert whatever right so open ai i think tesla back and forth at some point there's a falling out and that's really the the fracturing of open ai into sam altman um and some of these guys got it now xai get started you have anthropic those guys worked at open ai spun out right and they're going to do the safe ai company whatever so very on the day and correct so if you look at this actually you now have a bunch of competition because one they all believe the prize is so big but two is they all disagree on how to go and do it what is the price i mean you tell me how much money can you make if you control intelligence control and god that's getting dangerous when you say it like that now it's no different than if you're the person who controls you know five million employees and if you point all of their intelligence and you know sweat equity towards something you can achieve a lot look at how bad it got though when it got to the race of who can control the internet we almost have a lot of people who can control the internet the whole world censored away the sitting president was taken off the internet at one point whether you agree with his policies or not so now we're talking about that on an exponential scale because it's talking about intelligence something that can think essentially perhaps for itself when it gets to that point well there's definitely like recursive learning at this point there's a lot of crazy stuff right um now one of the things that i will call out is there has been a magnifying glass put on this stuff in the last five years three years whatever it's been um some of the best companies i invested in back in 2016 or so they now are ai companies but at the time i went back and looked at the pitch decks they were talking about big data and machine learning so there's some fluidity between things that have been around for a really long time and now the like ai label great it's like the gender fluidity of ai listen if uh they don't identify there's one company i'll say this because they're they're killing it so uh i think that they'll get a good laugh at it there's a company called placer placer p-l-a-c-e-r and i went back i looked at the original uh information it was all about big data machine learning and all this stuff it's now placer.ai and they're killing it right and like put.ai simpler well here's the best part i think the founder's a genius because he understood hey there's a ton of attention capital et cetera going here my customers are more likely to want to work with an ai company or more likely to want to work with an ai company versus one that's not below whatever so like entrepreneurs also are adapting to the environment as much as entrepreneurs are dictating the environment right now if you go and you look at one of the biggest pieces to this i think that we need as much competition as possible i think that we need 20 more companies trying to go build this the anti-peter teal idea well again it goes what are you optimizing for as an investor i want no competition right they're like you want to invest in the monopoly of course that's how you generate the most returns but from a societal standpoint we want a hundred companies all competing because they all serve as checks and balances against each other interesting it drives the cost down it drives the experience but like competition leads to innovation so who are you because that's a good question because you just point the two scenarios you're both on both right you don't identify well well it depends on what i'm optimizing for right is if you think about as an investor i'm constantly looking for scarcity right to me my entire investing strategy is find scarcity i actually think that that is what peter looks for too right is he's looking for a monopoly i don't like this first name basis yeah well he he um i know that you may not like him but uh i used to years ago i liked him before i knew about him he's probably the single most intelligent person i've ever had a conversation with oh he's a genius there's no doubt about that the second thing is um in a very similar way to i would like to get all these different perspectives etc he is probably the one person i have seen that will seek out all across you know people he thinks he disagrees with the people he agrees with whatever and he loves to debate he's literally comes from the debate world etc he likes chess all these kind of things and so he likes to kind of the banter back and forth now i also think that there's a lot of uh the like uh myth of peter till now the mystery of him not helping his case hold on and sometimes i see stories that people are saying things and then i will either through friends or people associated whatever know a little bit more and be like i can see how that story gets written but like that's probably not the thing i think when you hesitate to be able to answer the question like do you think the human race should survive i think when you're running a company that you name after what the bad guy in the lord of the rings used to watch everyone the company is funded by the deep state i think when you're moving to argentina to get off the x after you just funded the vice president and personally put him in the role right there and i mean i'm gonna keep going on here and you know basically funded an entire campaign to get the guy in there and then watched it all fall like a sack of bricks because of the war and epstein and all that i think when you are not just on emails with jeffrey epstein but coordinating with him talking with him going back and forth clearly meeting with him setting things up with him long after he was convicted of all these horrible things and when you have all the resources as a guy like that to be able to know who you're dealing with and who that person deals with and everything and you know i i think when you're someone who talks about the population of the world as x's and o's and basically like zeros and ones yeah i i don't think these are net positives at on the world and now you saw like you talk about these different perspectives he brings in i'll send this over deep so this thing leaked where he calls in all these different people from around the world where you know they're meeting about the future of sex how to build a cult like all these different things some things that make a good headline that are probably taken out of context but then they like leak the actual you know i guess like the the what's it called the like schedule of all of it and you're looking at it and you're like okay he's not inviting like billy from the block to get perspective so when you say he's courting all different perspectives you're right he invited people like jonathan greenblatt who has political differences with him he invited people you know he's on the bilderberg group they have people from the left and the right across there he invites all these people around the world but what they do have in common is that they're all a part of elite sectors these are not your average everyday forget average everyday american i'm talking average everyday global citizen but and he puts together groups like this and it's just like my brother in christ if you are trying to get people to trust you keep doing this because it's going to actually have the complete opposite effect so take all of that and we can go through some of the things that i think the media is wrong on he is probably the first person that we know of that went to a major technology or corporation and said you do not understand that you're not going to be able to do that you're not going to understand the plight of the average person you do not understand why socialism is rising and it is imperative that you spend time focused on trying to learn this yeah i think he did i can't remember exactly but i think it was something like 2020 it was 20 no it was earlier than that even earlier right so like 2016 i think so if you almost think about it from the perspective of somebody who's hanging out with the elites you know successful people whatever but has the ability not only to have that thought but to formulate it articulate it and then you know you're not going to be able to think it's big enough and important enough to then go send to mark zuckerberg at facebook etc i think that's part of why a lot of the folks who know him or people like him are like dude this guy is rare do you think he's saying that because by the way his analysis i know the email you're talking about is a private email too right so he probably was like you know whatever his analysis was borderline perfect like kind of crazy right yeah do you think it's because he cares about the people that will fall under the thumb of that or he is talking to the every elites that are with him knowing that if something like that happened there's going to be a lot of people that are going to they're fucked i i think that there is um less black and white than people realize because i think that when you look at it from the perspective of use socialism maybe as an example socialism sounds awesome right like everything's gonna be free you know like all like there's a reason why it's a timeless idea for people to adopt until they realize it doesn't work right um if socialism becomes the dominant political view it doesn't matter if you're elite or not yes now he's fucked if that happens now the people with the most resources get hurt more than the average person but everyone gets hurt right that's right so again it goes back to like i know some people which i who i will not name who i genuinely think are like bad people who like will howard given a given a dollar on on the table will will do very immoral unethical things right i also think that there's a lot of folks who because their name drives media traffic there's all these little data points that get taken and this whole public image gets construed and all of a sudden people are like this horrible person now use for example donald trump i have no knowledge that you or i don't have there are a lot of people in this country who think that he and some small group of people were sexually assaulting five-year-olds nine-year-olds whatever right the people who were going to do the ufc 250 event they were actually i think in some of the messages said that there was a group of people who were eating infants wait who who was this the the people who just got arrested that were going to do the two guys who were doing 250 attack and part of the reason the part of their logic behind why they were going to attack this group of people was oh there's this like secret cabal of people who eat infants whatever yeah so again eating infants like legitimate pedophilia underage girls up to just like you're just a scumbag dude whatever right that's like a pretty wide spectrum of i think on the like ethical range but then there's a bunch of people who are like dude i don't care like all i don't like any of it right i i just don't like i don't care where you're on the spectrum like the whole spectrum i'm just throwing out and so when you look at that you say to yourself are we ever going to know the actual truth probably not the full truth we'll never know about all this stuff yeah right and so i go back to okay if we are trying to evaluate this stuff you pretty much cannot get to the answer of like what is this person's intentions because you're never going to have all the details you're never going to have all the facts you can be suspect for sure i think that i'm suspect of people in the ai world i'm suspect to people in other industries definitely suspect to people in government all this kind of stuff right right but i don't think that we're ever going to be like you know what i know the plan like the master plan i figured it out here's i'm not saying we will either we may have an idea of the direction of that that's a really good idea like that's what i'm saying pomp if it were one or two things with peter teal i could be like i could straw man and be like all right i mean you know maybe we're just whatever and he's socially awkward it's not one or two things it's a million let's go through a couple of things that you said right and um i always tell people everyone has flaws everyone you have flaws i have flaws right anybody right yeah a lot of flaws take the like uh moving thing i know of maybe five different stories in the last decade he's moving somewhere and then he ends up back in la or miami i'm looking at a guy that moved somewhere and when i went to miami i came back to new york right but remember i think there was uh new zealand was one yeah he was there then he was uh well the the story is i think he got citizenship in new zealand we can check that i think you're right right argentina all the stuff right so like i always just say like maybe or maybe somebody's going on a summer vacation right and again it sounds crazy to be like oh i'm buying a place but whatever but like it doesn't sound so crazy if you know you're super wealthy and like whatever so it goes back to just like we we don't know all the details my guess is that he does have citizenship citizenship in new zealand right all this stuff right and i think i can't remember all the details but i think there was something like there was a venture fund he's gonna make investment you got the citizenship that's why i did it right whatever he also wanted to see the set of lord of the rings he likes that but again it was like i remember there was a whole slew of stories of like he's moving because that's the place that like if a bomb goes off or something like that's the place that's not gonna get affected of what can reach where things can reach hold on all right i'm not crazy right isn't that have you seen this map but isn't that what like the original like new zealand thing was like during the pandemic all these guys were like i'm gonna move to new zealand yeah there's another country halfway around the world that looks pretty good too it's called argentina it's just so perfect so right out of the look at that move right out of the zone but here but here's a great example brady so let's use this and this is again maybe my way to explain how i think about the world when i see this map right here i'm like oh my god argentina i freak out right and then i say to myself well what's more likely that somebody is trying to move outside the impact zone i don't know what the red thing here is but like the impact zone okay but of what everyone's dead oh okay all right jesus talking about just i'll just open all the can can of worms oh that delivery was amazing all right so outside of the impact zone right or is it more likely that peter teal stanley druckenmiller all these guys are obsessed with and like the policies of javier malay down in argentina and they believe that his you know chainsaw in the middle of the street all this stuff because here's the other side of that right stanley druckenmiller has this famous story where he heard a speech of malay and he went on his computer he did no research other than he asked ai what are the five most liquid funds that have exposure to uh to argentina these adrs and it gave him back an answer and he bought all five of them have you seen the inflation in argentina since you came in though hasn't it hasn't it dropped substantially there's things that he said there's things that he said that's like oh that makes a lot of sense like the guy the guy is an incredible political skillful guy but like it hasn't i don't think it's like world war five or anything but it's not like it's as far as i know like their economy is not this unbelievable bastion oh no i think that he i think that the inflation rate has fallen off argentina's inflation has plummeted from a peak of over 211 at the end of 2023 to left roughly 33 by mid-2026 monthly consumer price increases had slowed to roughly 2.1 however this rapid stabilization achieved through severe austerity and deregulation has resulted in suppressed real wages and a drop in manufacturing output i think the number that i looked at was the real wages thing so that's my mistake i'm pretty sure that's what i was just just unpack this one paragraph real quick right there's good and bad in here inflation went from over 200 down to 30 by the way 30 inflation still horrible if we had 30 inflation in america 211 no of course it's better than where they were but if we had 30 inflation in america you me and everybody else be in the streets and you know we march into washington dc right so 30 is not like something to go and celebrate unless you had 200 before so that's first the is real wages coming down and dropping manufacturing output, right? Those aren't necessarily good things, but having the severe austerity and the deregulation probably are actually leading to economic growth. So we go back to, and this is always the hard part of these conversations is like, there's no like easy button, press this one thing and everything is amazing. There's trade-offs. And so if you look at the, the plight of the people, which is now this like huge, you know, kind of like overgeneralization, cause there's all kinds of different people in Argentina. Some are benefiting from the inflation. High inflation usually means the stock market does really well. So I bet you, if you looked Argentina, just never looked it up. I bet you Argentina is one of the best performing stock markets in the last five years. Yeah. Right. Because if inflation's at 200%, that means asset prices are going up. I can't speak to Argentina and who's participating in their markets at all. I don't know the first thing about it, but like in America, I don't want to be the Argentine. No, no, it's all right. Like it's, it's good to look at it to see like, if it's doing better, but in America, Deef and I were just talking about this on a weekend episode. And by the way, it says, over the last, Deef just got this, over the last five years, Argentina's primary stock index, the S&P, more of all, experienced unprecedented nominal growth, shattering all-time highs to surpass 3.3 million index points. However, in USD adjusted terms, the market's performance is much more grounded, reflecting hyperinflationary pressures and the sweeping, so it's up like for sure. But here's the thing, in their currency, in their currency, but if you look at US dollar terms, it's not because all of a sudden it's growing. It helps their people because it's in their currency. If you're an investor, but what percentage of Argentinian people are investors? That's what I want to ask you about. Because again, I don't know anything about Argentina, but here in America. But these are problems, these are problems across every country. Across every country. In America, Deef and I were just talking about this on one of the weekend episodes, but like prior to the 08 crisis, it's not like Billy and Bob on Main Street owned the majority of the stock market. Not at all. But they did own, what was it? Five, 5% of the Argentinian people participate in the stock market. Yeah. Let's see. All right. That's. So 95% of people are getting hurt. 5% of people are benefiting. So that's actually very similar because before 08, it was somewhere, it was like maybe 17%, something like that. Deef was owned by Main Street investors. The other 83 owned by ultra wealthy and that kind of thing. It's now somewhere between 7 and 11% with the emphasis on seven. And point being. In the US? In the US. No, no, no, no, no. Retail ownership of the stock market is like 25%. Let's look at that. Let's look it up again. We had seven to 11%. Yeah. Say like what percentage of the US stock market is. We literally had this screenshot on the episode. That was, that was the episode two weeks ago. It was like an hour. Yeah. Now one of the questions, how do they define retail investor? Like if, if retail investors defined as like people who have a hundred million dollars, but they're just like a dude on the, on the internet. We were talking about, I think we asked like Main Street investors. What do we got, Deef? See like 58% of you. So this is something that I'll, I'll dangerously say I've got a little bit of. What I want, Pomp, is not what percentage of households own any stock. I want to know what percentage of the market they hold. Because you understand that's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about who owns stock and who doesn't. Because the reality is the more money you have in something, the more control you have. That's why Bill Ackman can go corporate rate a company versus like, you know, me. I wouldn't even take my call. This is what, this is part of the problem is the numbers are pretty wide, like 10 to 40%. I don't know what that means. Right? Yeah. We, I want to get that. We asked. But they account, but here's, but here's one interesting thing. 20 to 40% of daily trading volume. That number has been drastically increasing, which may actually not be a good thing. New rules. Well, there's rules, but if everyone is just doing like zero day option trading, then they're basically just gambling. With very little money. And handing the money over to, you know, somebody else, then like, actually we don't want them doing it. Right? Well, my, my point I'm getting at is like, I, I'll, I'll show you this, the clip earlier of like us actually pulling it because we had a perfect. Retail investors hold equity assets equal to 10% of US market capital. Okay. That's in the range of what we were at. So what my point is, when we see something like the Iran war happen and gas prices become ex, you know, astronomical, everything goes crazy and all that. And yet the stock market goes up, you know, you have a stock market divorce from reality. Does that last forever? It absolutely does not. There's always a crash that'll come at some point. You and I, it's our best guess when it happens. We don't know, but I believe that for so long, especially in the COVID era, especially in that era, the stock market has become more and more divorce divorce from the average person. Because the separation between the highest 0.01% class and everyone else has increased so much that people like Elon Musk are literally trillionaires now and control so much of the marketplace just by default that like, yeah, these are the people that pay for fucking, you know, the gas. On their private jet with just income, they earn off some stupid fucking bond every day. So it doesn't affect them like it affects me going to the gas station. There's two aspects to this. The first is I think people would be surprised at how much it's a lack of education that they're on the losing side of that trade. Here's a good example. Bill Ackman. Today, you can be partners with Bill Ackman. You can go on the stock market. His company is publicly traded. All of those returns, all of the fees, everything goes into his company. Now, does he own a lot of the company? 100%. But you can literally own the same thing that he owns in his company. Right now, if you take your, you know, $10,000, Bill Ackman's not going to call you and be like, what do we do? You know, we make this decision, right? But at least economically, right, you can take your money, you can do that. You also, in his case, can invest in some of his funds directly as well. So you can own the management company, you can own it. Blackstone, publicly traded. Goldman Sachs, publicly traded, etc. Now, that's one piece of it. It helps. And the reason why all investors who run these companies, they also get paid a salary. So they're not just getting compensated off of what is the stock price doing. They're also getting the cash salary. And some of these, every year, there's a thing that comes out of how much do people make. I think Chris Hone was the winner last year. Like $2 billion or some crazy number. Now, he generated a lot of money. And the thing that I always go back to, and this is something that, again, 10 years ago, I didn't quite understand. Now I understand much better. Right. Right. Right. But when you go and you look at what people are doing, 50% of Americans don't have any investments. So if you go and you look at the 58% here, it's saying of American households who have exposures, not even they're investing, it's through the 401ks, they're benefiting from all this stuff. It's actually the group that does not invest. Now, why do they not invest? Are they though, Paul? What do you mean? Are they benefiting? Because, again, I'll use the 08 crisis as an example. The people that won out of that are the people who had a lot of money to work on. with. I used to like give this speech with clients like when I worked on Wall Street. It's like it takes money to make money. So if I was not even like an ultra elite person, but someone who's very wealthy, let's say I own a business, whatever it is, and I'm worth $12 million and I'm 50 years old when 08 hits, my portfolio takes a tank. It goes down to fucking 6 million. I'm shitting a brick. It sucks. But like I have a nut to work with on the way back up. Whereas if I'm 57 years old and I've been saving into my 401k at the time for 35 years and I have, you know, 780 grand in there and I'm seven, eight years away from retiring and getting to whatever my numerical goal is to be able to live off the income for the rest of my life. Well, my portfolio went down to fucking, you know, 275, 300 and I sold everything because I literally almost was losing all of it. And now I didn't get to participate on the way up and the wealth gap scale went like that. So like with just by saying, someone's participating, I've never bought that logic because there is so much more for people who just have average income to lose in those scenarios. And they're also by default, usually just like they don't pay attention to the stock market as much. They don't have the luxury to be able to do that. Whereas someone who maybe has a lot of money and a lot of resources and people they can hire to help them and understand things along the way, like they can actually get helped on the other side. You want to know a crazy stat along these? What? Size of the same coin. If we look at the poverty rate in America since the 1990s, it has quote unquote crashed. It used to be whatever it was to say 13, 14%. And now it's down to 11. Yeah. Right. Okay. You want to know the craziest part of it? How many people go to the other one? How many people were in poverty? No, no, go to the other image. In 2006, there was roughly 36 million Americans who lived under the poverty line. In 2024 to 2026, there's 35.9 million. The number hasn't really changed. So the American population has been growing, but there's still 35 million Americans. What is the poverty line though? How much has that moved correctly with inflation? That's number one. Number two, how much more of society is addicted to drugs Of course. How much more is society? What do our suicide stats look like? The American poverty line? How much happier are people, what is this, since 2006? Oh no, I'm saying this is a bad thing. I'm not saying, I'm saying that most people will point to the poverty rate and they'll say, oh, it's coming down. That's good. I'm saying, but there's still 36 million Americans in 2026. And in 2026, 20 years later, we have the same number of people in poverty. It's just that the baseline grew because there's more Americans, but the same 36 million people, I would love to know how, what, so. $15,960 is the poverty line. $33,000 for a family. Yeah, that can basically buy you enough, a can to jerk off into. Like, you know, what? That's the minimum annual income. But, all right, so here's another, I don't know if they even have a stat for this, unfortunately, but it'd be great to look at. The next layer, that's a way bigger layer, which is the layer of how many people exist in, I'm just going to make it really, really broad right now. People, I don't want to think of numbers because I'll be way off, but like how many people exist and what would be termed the middle class and like firmly in the middle class, not teetering the line between middle and lower class 20 years ago versus today. And what kind of economic power on a percentage basis of GDP did the middle class have 20 years ago versus what they have today? I know those numbers. Look at it. This chart, I think, is actually, why this is such a controversial debate is because both sides are right. Both sides are, so it's a share of adults and U.S. middle class has decreased considerably since 1971 when Nixon took us off the gold standard. 60% of people were considered middle class. Right. 14% were upper middle or upper income and 25%. Yep. Today, the middle class has shrunk. That's 2021 too. I'll bet it's way worse. It's way, well, the trend just continued, right? The middle class is even smaller. But some of those people, moved to the upper income and some of those people moved to the lower income. That's right. And so the middle class is disappearing. That's where you're getting that K-shaped economy is it's getting actually worse for some people and it's getting way better for some people. Now, if you look here, actually the shift on a net basis has been upper income. But again, it goes back to, it doesn't matter what the data says. What this shows is that more people move to the upper income than that move to the lower income as they shrink. Do you think the people in lower income give a shit? Right. Right? 30% of people, people are deemed lower income in 2021. It's probably worse today, right? So maybe it's 32, 33, whatever the number is. And they don't care what your data says. All they're saying is, I don't have enough money to buy groceries or afford gas or whatever. That's right. And so again, if you bring this kind of full circle here, what we ultimately have to decide is, is artificial intelligence going to be a benefit or a net negative to those people? My guess is that it's actually going to be a benefit. It will not come without trade-offs, but, it will lead to a more positive impact on these people than it will lead to the negative trade-offs. - Just in the interest of not making this too cluttered. I don't want to get in the weeds with every single thing with AI in the sense that like you and I could sit here and have a fucking four hour conversation that Deef would get very animated in as well about like where AI is used in art incorrectly and stuff like that. And what the future of that is. That's a separate kind of thing. I'm just looking at this. - It's coming for the podcasters. - No, no, not, it won't come for that. But I worry about it with like that. - Famous last words. - Actual real art with stuff like that. But like, you know, I'm looking at it from like the utility standpoint today and the use case standpoint of humans and correctly. So you keep using this word trade-off, but a part of that, the calculation of that word is who is controlling the trade-off on the other side. And we keep talking about it today, but like, you know, it, to be fair, it has always been statistically, as far as I know, it's been explained by people smarter than me. It's always been statistically accurate that you're more likely to have say a psychopathic type personality, be a CEO of a major company. That's not a new trend, but we now have very clear psychopaths who run companies like this, like a Sam Altman, you know, who are in control of these technologies. And in his case, who joke openly on camera, you know, about the fact that, you know, this is probably gonna end humanity if things like that, while they're building bunkers and trying to figure out how to get the fuck off the planet and are worth billions of dollars. And so when I'm thinking about those trade-offs, what I can't have is the tsunami of the trade-off from the other side of like the bad shit, way outweighing the good shit because of the people whose hand is on the button. How much do you worry about that? - Whenever I hear conspiracy theories about the government, nine out of 10 of them, I say you're giving them way too much credit. They're not that smart, right? Like, like you think that they really, they got 400 people together and they had some big, you know, conspiracy theory and no one said anything. Right? Or you think they're smart enough to pull that off. Now, one out of 10, I'm like, oh hell yeah. Like definitely there's some sort of conspiring that's going on, whatever, right? So I'm not in either camp a hundred percent, but generally I think we assign way too much intelligence, et cetera, to the government and their ability to conspire against the people in a way that now, especially with the internet, we're not gonna find out. So I always look at it as if there's a conspiracy theory, last five, six years, that was just being early. That was being right to a lot of things, right? So we now know, it's not a conspiracy theory, it was the truth, right? That's very different than things that are still out there that were like, oh, this is a conspiracy theory, but we don't have any facts yet that is true. Maybe we will at some point, but usually I think we give the government way too much credit. I think the same thing is happening here. So let me give you a couple of examples. I think that there are a lot of people who enjoy the fact that people are debating, are they a good person or not? Or do they have good intentions or not? Or are they as powerful as they think they are, right? Is it almost like plays into, I am important, I am successful, I am rich, I am the person you need to bring onto your interview, whatever. Take Claude as an example. The US government and Anthropic, I don't think that they're friends, right? Especially this administration and Anthropic, they've been going at each other. The US government still uses Claude. Claude and the Anthropic team are probably doing stuff that they didn't think they were gonna be doing. So there's some like gray area in the middle there. Now, could there be a situation where Claude did something that all of a sudden everyone would freak out and be like, okay, enough is enough? Well, if you go and you look at what recently happened, we kind of had a dry run of the situation. So for those that don't know, Anthropic came out with a new model. That new model they were testing internally. So that's the thing, they see it before anybody else does. It was called METHOS. And they realized that this thing was so powerful that if you pointed it at a website, a software system, et cetera, it was able to detect cybersecurity kind of issues that humans may have missed. And it was able to exploit those issues to gain control, access, et cetera. That would be bad. So if all of a sudden they gave you, me, and 8 billion other people access to a thing that could crack into systems, that's not good. What they did, they alerted the US government. They then alerted a bunch of cybersecurity companies. There was a joint decision, my understanding, that they gave access to this tool to the cybersecurity companies. And they said, hey, this thing is coming. Use this to figure out how to upgrade all your systems, blah, blah, blah, whatever, so that you can go prevent these issues from happening. At some point, there was a second decision that was made where METHOS never got released. Instead, they created something called Fable. And Fable was like a watered down version that had some governors around what could be used. So you still had a lot of the power, but it was like, hey, there's some things we definitely don't want to put in the hands of people. They release it. I don't know, it was out for maybe a week. Somebody at Amazon allegedly cracked the governor on it. And so they had the full power of this thing. And they were like, hey, national security issue, US government, pay attention. We cracked this. We open sourced it. Kind of like a jail broke phone. - Yeah, like a zero day kind of thing. - Yeah, like a jail broke phone. Right? They jail broke the system. My understanding in reading some of the public story about this is then there was a disagreement with the US government as to, is this a big deal or is it not? US government's freaking out. They're telling them to retract it, take back the model, don't give it to people and stuff. Sounds like Anthropocene maybe didn't think it was as big of an issue. So there's some disagreement there. The US government then came over the top and labeled them with essentially a national security label. That said, anyone who uses this thing that is not a US citizen, you're gonna be responsible. There's gonna be kind of repercussions, et cetera. That call, and that was even if they are an Anthropic employee and they're not a US citizen, if they're using this thing, there's gonna be trouble. Anthropic pulled it back. Now I look at that situation and I say, okay, there's kind of a cat and mouse game going on here where you have one side, they create a piece of technology. Everyone's trying to catch up to how to protect themselves. Then who gets it? Who doesn't get it? You know, all this stuff. That is unfortunately how every technology has been adopted over time the regulators the rule makers etc are trying to figure out it live yeah what happens that's right happening cryptos happening in ai it's happening in energy it's having all these different things i don't know if there's anyone in the world who can point to like what is the right solution so then it begs the question who do we trust in my default position i don't trust any of them i don't trust the government to come up with the rules yeah i don't trust the technologist to promise to do the right thing i don't trust the person who's got access to the technology to not do certain things you get in this very weird world and so if you can't trust that anyone knows what they're doing going to do the right thing all the time etc you then have to ask yourselves what risk am i willing to take so from that perspective i would not give um there's a famous example of uh i forget maybe it was ilia so somebody gave access to the model to their home security system their home uh cameras etc and part of the story was the camera realized that because they had access i think to like their biometric stuff they were probably a little dehydrated and it could see on the camera that they hadn't gotten up and gotten a drink of water and so it sent a message get up and get water and the guy got up and got water and sat back down i was like good job like i'm not doing that right like i'm not giving it access the cameras inside my home not do it you know also now there are some people like him he was looking at it more from like how far can you take the technology whatever again that scares the hell out of me but there's people who are like dude i have a problem i never drink enough water i would love for some system to tell me you know what there's there's good use cases if they have the governors and if the governors are actually able to be built you don't get reassurance though when we've all heard the famous story i've talked about on the podcast a bunch before like facebook was building an ai probably back when you were there and you weren't in that department but like in 2015 2016 or whatever and within 24 hours the two ais they built invented a language that only they could understand and they quietly looked at each other like the people and they just fucking pulled the plug because they could pull the plug that time but what about when you can't pull the plug in the future again like it's not to be like fear with technology we know how that goes throughout history we know how that goes throughout history we know how that goes throughout history we know we just do have to consider that we're building something for the technology for the first time that may be able to think for itself that's never been done before so it's not to say well this time is the time where we need to say no technology and shut it down it's not to say that's the answer but like you know i'm all for the innovation if like maybe everyone could in a group think scenario somehow break every psychological standard of human history and say hey let's all just agree to look at this a little bit slower than we had release as much as i want to see that though realistically as i said that goes completely against human nature and that's probably not going to happen that's why i worry so from my perspective again go back to i have direct experience building around these systems now our decision not to have the ai be able to move your assets with cfo sylvia is explicitly going after this right what are the odds that it's going to make the wrong transaction send the money to the wrong person buy the wrong thing sell the wrong thing do it at the wrong time when you didn't want it to do it whatever it's probably actually pretty low like these systems are generally pretty good they've listened to the governors all this stuff if there's a one percent chance though for us today with a new product that is built on delivering personalized insights to people on their finances it's not worth the one percent risk right so what do you do you only give read access and if we were to ever then say hey we're adding the functionality where now it can move assets for you whatever every single person would have to re-opt in and say okay i want this functionality with a 40 page terms of service that you don't read and hit so again this goes back to you know one of the things um my friend mark yusko one time told me this and uh uh i think directionally it is correct the numbers probably changed for he's the hedge fund guy right for every engineer that we graduate in the united states it's something like 40 engineers in korea right for every one lawyer that they create we create like 14 here or something right so like just like we're a very litigious society right there's always constantly somebody running around trying to shirk you whatever so like that has led to this like crazy thing now one side is hey get your stuff together and make sure that you clearly tell people whatever i don't read the terms of service i'm sure you don't either for 99 of the products don't right and then you go and you read some of this stuff and you're like this sounds horrible right agree you start using the product right like they could do all kinds of crazy stuff we think you have to buy into convenience that your society does i've never read the terms of service of like a social media platform i bet you if you go and read that you'd be like this sounds kind of nasty i'm not i'm not giving them that or this or that and then you're like you know what like i like pictures let me disagree on instagram right so you kind of come back to it now one other aspect of ai that we haven't talked about is the data centers yeah and i know that they're controversial real fast and i'll take a piss and then we'll we'll get deep into this and i want to come back to the peter teal thing as well all right what so how many have you just had like one conversation with peter teal before do you actually like know him a little bit um i've had maybe four or five different ones what are what's the context like are you meeting with him in person you talk to him on text like no no just in person and uh the first time i ever met him he wanted to uh debate bitcoin um he uh very intelligent he's got some of the more interesting theories to think about you know who created it or how did it uh who does he think created it he doesn't have a specific person but i think he's publicly talked about the fact uh there was a um cyber security and money conference i think in antigua in like 1999 and because he was building paypal fraud digital currency all that stuff was very um you know much topic that they would discuss and so he was at this conference and i think he said there's like 200 people there and so his thought is whoever created bitcoin was at that conference he doesn't know who it would be but he's like if you were interested in digital currencies you know money moving around you know you know you know you know money movement uh cyber security all that kind of stuff that was like the who's who of the time and so his thought is someone that was there uh that's probably it so it's a little anti-climatic because you know he's like i think i know who it is but not an actual person but the context of your conversations is largely because you've been a long time like bitcoin guy an expert on that legitimately in the field the context of your conversations has usually been a premise of some sort of discussing that topic or other things we've talked about everything i think um somebody else a friend of mine uh used to work for him he was an expert on bitcoin and he was an expert on him and when he was there he invested in one of our companies and so um peter wasn't involved at all uh in uh in doing that a lot of founders fund guys i know really well um and i think very highly of them obviously he's involved there but my conversations have always been more uh i would consider like highbrow maybe like it's more about like technology trends or um you know maybe here's a good example of a type of conversation that a guy like that would have which i think is um illuminating i remember asking him going into the uh i guess it was 2024 election um who he thought potentially had a shot and i was throwing out certain names of candidates um that would at the time were rumored to be running against biden and um i asked him about ron desantis and one of the things he said is he goes uh ron desantis has to figure out home prices in florida or that's going to be like his achilles heel i remember being like that's like a weird but very kind of like what you would expect somebody yeah i can think of like five achilles feet hills ahead of that but that's interesting but his point was again going back to socialism affordability home prices like that whole thing if you can't solve it in your own state then how are you going to convince the national population that you can solve it across the country right so like that was like a general type of thing where um and i enjoy talking with him in the sense of uh it's very um intellectually combative but in like a respectful way and it causes you to think more deeply because when you hear something like home prices in florida are going to affect the candidate's potential thing and he explains it like actually that makes a lot of sense and so i think that's why you see a lot of folks who frankly there's probably a lot of people who don't even agree with them but enjoy talking to somebody like that because there's this like intellectual uh debate back and forth um you're talking to an intelligent person right with ai like if you're talking to an intelligent model you know there's a lot of people just like to sit there and just talk to the model because it's got these thoughts did you talk with them at all about the future future humanity or like where this is going you didn't you weren't tempted to do that no because again it goes back to like uh in most of my conversations whether it's with him or uh anybody who i think people would put as like a super successful investor you know executive whatever i think that is probably overblown how much people think about that stuff or talk about that like it's very he seems to talk about it a lot i don't think that's overblown i think that people ask somebody like him those types of questions because they know it's very provocative and they know that he's going to answer it and he's not going to just be like i'm not going to answer that he's not going to just be like i'm going to talk about that but look at the look at the things and places he goes and what they have on literally the topics that he is curating and putting together he talks about this stuff a lot the future 100 right and i do think that um also there's an element of again not just him i think a lot of these folks part of your job as an investor or as an executive is trying to understand where is the world going because as the world evolves there are ramifications politically socially technology you know all of this stuff and so take mark zuckerberg maybe as an example peter was or still is on the board of facebook zuck has had to navigate a lot of things what's happening with just pure technology right he really is one of the companies that went through the shift of like you had to have a server like a physical piece of hardware in the closet to run the company to now it's all in the cloud like that alone is like we kind of forget you know 20 25 years ago right then you have okay all this competition of all these social networks all this kind of stuff people forget also that when they went public just from a pure business standpoint everyone was wondering could they make the transition to mobile phones right so like 2000 2004 i think when facebook started 2007 the iphone comes out so now all of a sudden everyone's scrolling in these feeds and that's on a phone instead of on the computer the size is smaller will people pay for the like we don't even think about that anymore crazy right but like that was a whole debate then you get the whole vr stuff metaverse they changed the name to meta like all this kind of stuff i you know yeah they kind of put that to the way well fascinating question would be like if he could go back would he change the name back right right i don't know but like there's stuff like that then you start looking at all this ai stuff and so there's um i heard a fascinating conversation with uh the cfo of palette or of um anthropic and what he was talking about is basically if you allocate too much money to this you go bankrupt if you allocate too little to it then you're behind on the technology you go bankrupt so like in order to build out all of the data centers the hardware train the models do all this stuff you're shooting at like a moving target and you're trying to forecast demand for your product and dario has come out and said that they ran scenarios i think it was like two years ago or maybe last year and they said okay we have a scenario where we like double demand and then like let's do a crazy scenario we 10x demand in that time period demand 80x he was like it was like off the chart we didn't even consider that as a like a realm of insane possibility he's like and we're trying to operate in this thing so we had to raise more money and we were growing faster but whatever zucks had to navigate all that kind of stuff and so why does mark zuckerberg spending time trying to figure out you know where the world is going or um you know jujitsu or or whatever well it's all holistic right i think that we all forget like these people are human and so you know what do people talk about on twitter allegedly well people are talking about you know uh they're like you know wake up at four o'clock and they're like i like do my cold bath i you know eat this food whatever it's like crazy shit people talk about right it's everything thief does every day well like the funniest thing is like the world's richest man don't do any of that shit like he's sleeping on the factory floor right yeah warren buffett by the way he ain't doing any of that stuff either right whatever diet coke but when you look at the these folks i think one of the aspects that i always try to remind myself is like they are trying to much like everybody else understand where the world's going understand what the are there people who like take advantage or try to hurt people 100 but i don't think that most folks who end up being super successful are able to do that and maybe the best maybe example here uh closer to home is take somebody like jim's uh james dolan hated hated i mean new york fans and fans around the world were like he's the worst sports fan in history like literally there's been headlines right all this kind of stuff the finals come here they were giving away tickets to all these underprivileged kids they were selling off court side tickets to raise money for their foundation to all stuff and so you look at them like is he making the call on that stuff i have no clue right there's something good yeah but there's some positive yeah they won a title too then you hear the speech that he gave to the team yeah right and he's talking about i need this for 10 weeks blah blah whatever and all of that i'm like okay that's like interesting whatever yeah but the one that hit home and i actually tweeted i said thank you jim uh james dolan was he stood on the stage and when they were presenting the trophy he said something to the effect of you know new york i got it done i know it took longer too long yeah i know it took longer than we all wanted but i got it done yeah you see right you see uh at rockefeller where everyone was watching the the the party at radio city music hall where they were booing him and then he said they said that and they went yeah but like it like that to me was like such like a human moment yes where you're like you're the owner of a team you know that people hate you you're famous for the facial recognition software yeah and that's great like all this stuff right howard lutton at courtside too not great right but like then you look at this and you say to yourself okay the odds that that person is a bad person probably pretty low right in terms of is james dolan waking up every day like i'm gonna enrich myself at the expense of other people probably not now did he make decisions that maybe people don't agree with did he even make decisions that maybe he regrets i have no clue i don't know all the details of that but it's like even somebody who is like quote-unquote hated in the sports world is probably still a pretty good dude maybe may that might be a little recency bias he also brought in leon rose who was the best for my money for a while the best agent in the nba who built amazing relationships with so many players and understood the complexities of like socially integrating a team as well to say nothing of the skills and the skill sets put together and put together like an amazing team that plays the game the right way and dolan deserves credit for bringing a guy like that and yeah i saw a speech from january where he's like talking to the team like yeah i think they can win a title this year and all that and like yeah those are good things i guess like in the finals but like there's also been like 30 years of very bad press with a lot of things too and it doesn't doesn't mean like he's gonna die an old man maybe he's fucking a bad man maybe he's ebenezer scrooge and he wakes up one day and like this is the day he woke up and i'm hopeful that's like what it is for him as a person but like i think we do this thing where we focus too much on recency bias in society and then also if you take it another level and this is something you and i can relate to each other on across different people you know when you sit down with people you're more likely to like them you know you sit down for hours with peter teal and you're like come on this guy he can't be building bunkers and plotting you know the future of the end of the world like i know what that is and i i've been guilty of it probably myself sometimes too but you have to like look at you have to do your best and i don't i fail at it sometimes to zoom out to 30 000 feet and say okay what is this person really advocating for what are the actions that i can see there's a lot of unknowns but what are the things i can see and overall when i add those all together what does that more look like positive or negative not even like you know death or life just positive or negative and like that's kind of what you got to do with people i think that we put not enough on recency bias not enough think about yourself 10 years ago are you the same person absolutely not no most people aren't right so actually in my mind we should put more weight on what did somebody say recently what are they doing recently etc i'll give you maybe a finance example there's a guy kevin warsh became the fed chairman recently and when he got announced everyone was freaking out because he historically wanted to not have low interest rates and do all the things that the the central bank has done oh he has ties to the epstein class as well well hold on that seems to be a so when he when he did all that all of a sudden what happens is you say wait a second he is not going to lower interest rates that would be bad for assets and everyone freaks out in the market literally sold off when he got announced but then you go and you listen to what he had been saying over the last year and he was basically saying the exact opposite of what he had previously thought 15 years before now was he doing that to get the position and he really still believes something else we don't know but all you can go off of is like what has he been doing for the last 15 years and he's been saying recently he's been saying he's gonna get interest rates down whatever right so like that's a that was like a 180. that's like saying like you know the sky is blue now it's green you know type situation so i think that now if you go and you look take uh have i told you uh that i was in the epstein files you got mentioned in there actually i think i knew that yes i'm pretty sure i typed in your name i saw that can we pull up that email you weren't talking with him no not at all right it was uh so saturday when they dropped the um when they dropped the uh doj file that whatever the tranche was my phone blows up and i get online and all some people are like dude you're in the epstein files kurt metzger was in there too i said what i said what i said i never met this guy i don't know whatever right i didn't even know that he was a uh like a person uh you know in the world until maybe three or four years five years before whenever he's like started being the press that's when i first heard of who jeffrey epstein was and so all of a sudden i look at the email and the email is somebody who is using my name but not my email somebody else you know some fake email somebody is using my name with a fake email emailing jeffrey epstein's brother saying that they that i am an irgc informant and and you have to and you have to pay money or i'm going to tell everyone you used to i remember seeing this look how crazy this is there's been so much in there but this was so funny because you of all people had the most bodicast accounts online per follower of anyone i've ever seen this is 2020 so for context for people this is like crypto is going crazy 2020 2021 every single friend i have has gotten fishy emails extortion attempts you know instagram bots all this kind of stuff so like for me when i saw what the date was i was like oh this was like the heyday of all this so here's what it says mark i have no allegedly from you but it's not mark i have no doubt that you are a partner in your brother's case and you should go to prison you know you cannot escape from me you know that i can determine your crime i do not want to bother you for fm looking for my money give me ten thousand dollars so i cannot text you again mark i am an irgc informant i told you before i got my master's degree from a military university affiliated with the irgc Suffice it to say that you know Trump had sex with a girl under the age of 18 on your brother's island. Trump has assassinated an IRGC commander. They hate Trump. If I tell them they can expose Trump through you, then it's not just a matter of hacking information. Even your life will be in danger. I can send you the membership card in the IRGC in the secret telegram chat to see. You know what's funny? I almost tweeted about this because people were actually running with this. And the tweet said, I remember this now. The tweet said, no, no, no, guys. Pomp's email is, and I was going to put your real email. And I'm like, oh, wait. No, don't do that. That's a very, very bad idea. But the best part is that Epstein's brother just forwards it to the FBI. So I think there's a second one as well. I think there's two emails from a separate one. This is right after he died, too. They got right on it. It's like a day after he died. This was crazy. If he died. And so from my standpoint, you know, you can imagine. All of a sudden. You're like, wait a minute. That's not me. So I get online. There's people who they know that it's not me because of the email. I had one friend who said, oh, you're only asking for $10,000. I knew that wasn't you. Right. They're like, but I was on the phone with one of our communications people. And they're like, we have to issue a statement. And while we're on the phone, I see somebody and they're like going viral saying this. And I just responded like, you're an idiot. And the communication, I guess that's going to be our messaging. Yeah, there you go. I said, look, if you believe that's me, you're an idiot. That's funny as hell, though. So I bring that up because one, my guess is that there's a bunch of people who are in here who it is really their names, their emails. Like it's really them. And they had no clue about anything. They just, you know, they were on an email. They got introduced, whatever. There's actually a person I know who introduced one person to him. And they had been originally introduced as he's a potential investor. And they had talked to him once or twice, it seems like on email. And then they like later on met a founder. Wait, which guy do you know? The guy who did the introducing? The introducing. Correct. So he knew him pretty well. I don't know. Because here's the thing. You should ask him. I should ask him. And that's why I don't want to say who it is in terms of what the relationship there is. But I think about myself and I'm like, you know how many times I've like met somebody one time and then I meet someone and I'm like, oh, you know, you should talk to this person because they do something that could help you. And I make the intro. Now I'm like way more careful. I'm like, am I making an introduction that maybe, you know, later comes out in some files or something? So that's one. The second thing. It's the people that lied about it. That's what, that's the tell for me. So here's the second piece of it is I also think that there are a lot of folks who drastically underestimate the like gravity or momentum of what some of these people do. So like when you go and you look at it, I'd have to think through like what a good example would be. But there are people who have done things in their past, gotten in trouble, right? Not like this. This case in particular is different. But they somehow like rehab their image. They become, you know, valuable. They're an investor, whatever the thing is. More than 150,000 small businesses already use Homebase to keep their teams on track. Not everybody. I forget the one CEO who refused to meet with Epstein. There was one CEO. Oh, the Hermes guy. Some guy like. Like an awesome bro. And then Epstein sent him money for his foundation. He sent it back. Something like that, right? Like there was somebody who like obviously knew all the details. Like had a very good. Moral compass and was like able to refuse all of this. From that, you're like, okay, but how many of the people who are communicating with this person knew some of this information? Maybe I'll give you another personal example of, again, as I have progressed in my career, I start to realize there's certain things you have to change in your career. I once was taken to dinner by an investment banker with somebody who was involved in another company. And they were looking to do a deal. This investment banking firm, I trust. I've done deals with them before, right? They're good guys. And at the dinner, this guy was, you know, kind of a very, you know, good at marketing, but still like seemed like a good dude to your point, talking to him. And I have learned that if I'm going to potentially do a business deal with anyone, I just ask them a question. I'm going to find out what the worst thing you've ever done is. Because now we have people who. Will go and they'll, you know, Google or do security screens or whatever. Just tell me now. So just tell me, what's the worst I'm going to find? And this guy looks me dead square in the face and he says, oh, I'm banned from operating a public company for 10 years. I said, for what? He says, oh, I got caught up in this thing. And it turns out it was like some sort of like pump and dump newsletter thing, you know, whatever. Right. So I'm like, well, one, looking at the bankers, like, did you just bring me to, you know, dinner with a criminal? That's a great question. Right. But two, I can't blame anybody else. I didn't Google him. I didn't, you know, so I go home, I Google it. Right. And like, you know, it took a little bit of like intelligent Googling, but like it's there. It's public information. But I went to dinner with somebody without. And so like, again, what is the expectation in society of like one random interaction with somebody? Like maybe we should all have AI prompts of like every person we interact with, like send me the dossier of every bad thing that's associated with them or something. I'm going to give you an example of someone I believe. There's a good one here. Brian Johnson. Now, Brian Johnson. The don't die guy? Yes. Okay. So he was on one email with Jeffrey Epstein, ended up meeting with him on Zoom, and then nothing happened investment wise. This is 2017, long after he was convicted and all that. Brian Johnson probably should have come out and said something a couple of years ago. Like, hey, I remember I connected with this guy once. It was weird. There's people who have done that, and then they didn't have a problem. That said, he also like kind of over apologized when this came out. And he's like, I had no idea. And I thought he was the worst person ever within five minutes. And I'm like, all right, you probably didn't quite think that. But it's fine. I got it. Like, I believe that he just didn't do a background check on him and didn't know. I hope I'm right about that. But there are examples of that throughout. Where there are not examples of that are, oh, I don't know, the fucking 15 people from across elite society who went to his welcome home party from prison. Oh, I don't know the people who were on 11,000 emails with him, including a guy who was on 7,500 emails who sat in. That seat three years ago. Like, I'm sorry. You know. You know what's up. You know what it is. And there's no, you cannot defend that at any point. And then for me, the ultimate strike is when you lie about it. And we are living through a time now where we've talked about it today, where the middle class is going like this. And unfortunately, it was a guy who knew Epstein who pointed out this chart beautifully back in 2018, Steven Pinker. But like, it is literally a V like this. And so. Case-shaped economy. Yes. People getting in the streets. Like, that's the kind of thing that leads to fall of Rome and fucking class warfare and all those things that I don't want to see happen. But, you know, that's where it goes. And when you see people caught up in this who provably lie and then don't even do the effort of laughing in your face about it. They just continue to operate as if nothing happened. And, you know, the example that always comes to mind is a guy I will be forever tied. To through public, you know, just ripping him to shreds. And I'm happy to be that guy is Howard Lutnick because he got caught lying. It's fucking six ways to Sunday. And that fucking jerk off stands up on stage next to the president and doesn't even have the decency to resign. And the fact that Trump hasn't fired him is an embarrassment. But like when you see this, it is the ultimate. Fuck you. Who are you? You mean nothing to me. You know? Yeah, I will go courtside to the next game. People like that don't ever do anything like they want you to do, which is get physical with them. Do not do that. But everyone should practice their First Amendment right that every time that motherfucker walks out on a public street, their life is held verbally, you know. And when I see things like this and I see the fact that none of these people are being prosecuted, no questions are being asked. They fucking created a war just to divert from this thing. Yeah, you can't not get mad at that. Does that mean every single person in there is guilty objectively? No. But when I see volume of things, it's like there's no way a guy like Peter Thiel did not know he was dealing with. So let me let me unpack some of this. And the hard part about a lot of these conversations and trying to figure out what's true, what's not true, right, is, again, it goes back to what we said earlier. Like, we don't have all the information. We're never going to have all the information. I know Howard Lutton and his kids, I think very highly of his kids and have always had great experience with them. I would consider them. I would consider them no different than you, me or anybody else. Right. They're born into families. They're trying to figure out. I know nothing about the kids. I got nothing against them. So that's first of all, I've met Howard Lutton. I did. I did an interview with him. Right. He is very intelligent. He's a fantastic storyteller. He has a very emotional story, I think, tied to 9-11, which a lot of people didn't really understand the full extent of it. He came on the podcast. He explained it, et cetera. So I've always known that story for the record. Yeah. My interaction with him was in the podcast. I walked away from. that conversation and was like, wow, this guy was very impressive. Right. episode did very well i think a lot of people who heard him talk explain you know his views on the economy 9-11 all this kind of stuff and this is prior to be clear this was all prior to the files coming out this is like october of 2024 i guess right 24 yeah october 24 and um so you probably have way more understanding of all the details of whatever right um but i think that the thing i go back to is um in a lot of cases the cover-up is worse than the crime yes right and we could go through history of like how many people i mean even uh i think like martha stewart didn't she get in trouble not for the actual thing but for like lying about it yes right so like there's times where like people don't even do anything wrong they just get scared and they lie or something and would you agree this is clearly not one of those times though well so i don't know all the details but here's the one thing the one thing that i have to say is that i think that's a really important thing to think about because i think that's a really important thing to think about because i think that's a really important thing that i think that's a really important thing to think about because i think that's a really important thing to think about because i think that's a really important thing to think about i've heard people talk about publicly is the fact that he went to the island right which i think is like the big thing that everyone of the things okay so from that the other fact that i think i've heard is that and i think i sent a picture is he brought his family with him so i look at that and i say of course the second that the island is brought up everyone gets all you know they freak out i don't think why do you anyone hold on pump why do you go on to this is something only associated with that does why do you go on to the new york post podcast and concoct the whole dramatic story about the last time you were ever with jeffrey epstein because you're just the dude who can pick up on it right away and it was in 2005 and even though he's your neighbor for the next 14 years minus two years where he was in prison you never interacted with the guy at all and you say i never want to be around him for business personal or philanthropy when we have emails proving that in all the years after that forget just the island he was around him for literally business literally philanthropy and literally personally like there's emails of him getting drinks there's emails of him getting donations from jeffrey epstein and inviting him to galas there's emails of him trying to do business with jeffrey epstein to say nothing of the fact that he got his fucking place for what was it one dollar or whatever 11 the house he has next to jeffrey epstein all that it's like yes the cover-up is horrific in the sense that he's just a complete serial liar which then by the way and the reason part of it's personal with with him is i worked on wall street he was kind of viewed as like a legend and i remember some casting questions about him to me and danny jones is one guy who i would talk with a lot about this a few years ago and i would like kind of defend him and so then to see like what he is which is like you are this prolific of a liar that i can't believe anything else you've ever done or said to say nothing of the fact there are a lot of people at canter fitzgerald to talk about the money that he took well he away from them after 9-11 by the way hold on a second but go back for a second so i guess it comes back to and again there there's like uh somebody lies so take away from him for a second i think there's a bunch of like emotions that people have about epstein and all that stuff right but just like if someone lies that's bad i don't think anyone's like oh lying is good right i generally think actually there's some people who think lying is the worst thing you could do on top of just doing the thing but lying is bad right i think one of the aspects we have to ask ourselves is for all of these people did they lie about their affiliation their engagement their communications whatever but they actually didn't do anything wrong and so if we could run the opposite experiment if they just come out and been like yeah that was my friend i never did anything if i you know uh could go back i would be his friend would we care or is it actually they did something horrific you know all these allegations of underage girls and all this kind of stuff i don't even need to know that he did those things and that's not even something that i could say like he did to be clear but he clearly knew what that guy was about and he was doing and at least some of the people he was working for and he knew the truth about his interactions with him but and decided to lie about it i have to assume there is something darker there because then he's also one of the most powerful people in the world standing right next to the president even in like places where the commerce secretary it's like is that the guy you should be standing next i feel like that's where the secretary of state should be instead like he seems to be everywhere and like it just there is something that's not right and i think that's something so insidious but but go back for a second right so and this just may be a different way that we kind of uh approach these things um i mean i'm the president of the howard letnick hate club to be clear all right if we're being there you should invite him i don't know if he would come but you should invite him to see if he would come no he wouldn't all right um i've always come to these situations and i say i don't think i'm willing to him or anybody take the leap from uh i have to assume like once the assumption starts i usually take the approach of okay what is fact he said one thing something else i think he apologized not that that absolves him but i think he came out he has not apologized and so from that standpoint um he said nothing untoward happened on the island if you want to call that an apology after he got caught lying yeah so i always go to this idea of i can't take it to the full extent of i know someone did something unless we actually know that fact and so i think again going back to if you just extrapolate out to our whole conversation right what are certain technologists expectations or you know that their thing that's motivating them or the thing they're trying to accomplish i don't know now a lot of people aren't satisfied with i don't know right because they want the certainty of good person bad person very black or white type thing in my experience people are very complicated right people are complicated and you take a person and it could be the person who actually for you saved your life and then you find out that you're not the person who actually saved your life and you find out that they have this other side of them they're this horrible person but whatever yeah but i think i think we're making leaps when it comes to this kind of case pump i mean if you i would really encourage you to go through especially the second tranche that was dropped on on is that the one i'm in but yes actually yes okay but like the actual serious stuff in there like i i've had to go to people who previously i was like oh shit man they're crazy and apologize and be like hey even if you didn't actually have evidence when you were saying some things to me i don't even care i have to apologize and be like i can't rule that out anymore they talk in code about this but what you're what you're talking about i think is uh being highly skeptical and not giving people the benefit of the doubt because of the details of it yeah they knew like like why is tom what why is it like a requirement of this administration that you knew and ran with jeffrey epstein especially after his conviction like why why is that literally like a like i don't know if you want to call it freudian slipping we played it on a previous episode but talking about like yeah you know i i just i i knew he worked with israel and whatever so it was fine that's why i was talking with him in 2016 congratulations tom now you're the ambassador to turkey and by the way we're going to make you like this new role for syria and iraq while we're trying to rebuild those two and he's on an email with jeffrey epstein in 2016 where jeffrey epstein says take a picture of you and the child make me smile i'm sorry when you see this much even just circumstantial evidence and there's other things that are not they're beyond circumstantial you have to look at this and say why is this a giant really sick club that you know we're not allowed to know what they do when these are the same people who in some cases are you know at least as the front running the world my understanding of this specific situation is he was interacting with people left right independent red blue green yes it was more about power wealth etc very much like peter teal politics all that stuff right the second thing is um if we bring it all the way back to kind of where we started we said ourselves what is the world we want to see and so i probably spend less of my time focused on here's all the bad things and like let's yell and scream about it because i used to do that a lot right frankly i used to be up and you could tell me something and i was ready to take it to the mat do all that do you think you can do that about a giant international sex trafficking operation that also implicates my own government the united states and some of the most powerful people running the world do you think you can really be like yeah that was really bad but let's just move forward well here's the question is what is the desire outcome as of today the desire for the people right is that those people are flushed out of power i don't even by the way i'll stop before like prosecutions and shit like that though i do want to see that as well just get them the fuck out of power never let them be around to show their face they don't hold their hands on any levers or whatever and we rebuild somewhat the right way so let's take that as uh everyone comes together since that's the right agreement that is not a winning message in america how's that not a winning message because we already talked about donald trump and mom donnie they have messages of optimism so if you want to affect the change you don't think it's optimistic to say let's get demons out of our government and have it be run by normal people that might actually represent your interests in the future i think that's kind of optimistic i i think that if you go and you surveyed people on the street my guess is that 99.9 of people would say uh that epstein stuff is bad and they couldn't tell you a single detail about it 99.9 i think that's overestimating but your point's well taken in that do i think 80 of people could tell you a lot of details about it no i do not yeah whatever they know right just like most people they've heard something about it they think that it is association. They don't like, obviously we tell them any of the like high level details, uh, but they probably couldn't really tell you that much about who was involved. What are the allegations, all this kind of stuff. And so again, it comes back to being right or affecting change. And I don't disagree that. Why can't I have both? Why can't I, why can't I push both? Yeah. That's just not how the world works. Right. Cause I think I want the world to work that way though. So maybe I could affect the change, but, but look at it this way. If mom Donnie had spent his time attacking Trump, I don't think he wins. I agree. Right. That's two different things here. No, no, no. This is what I'm trying to explain. It's like, so if I go out and hold on, pop, if I go out and I say they've legislated away the middle class in this country, they've cheated you out of it. I want to regardless of what my politics are, don't care what they are. Just pretend it's just a general message. I want to put more money in your pocket. And I want to make sure people that were involved with raping kids can no longer steal money from you and play it at their satanic parties. I mean, I think that would resonate as a message. I think that's pretty fucking optimistic too. Yeah. It's pointing out one dark thing, one extremely dark thing, but it, but I think that holds in that message as well. But wasn't the other side already saying that going into 2024? What do you mean? That we might not have had all the details, but like, wasn't all of the, all the rumors about Trump's involvement, all these people's involvement, et cetera. With Epstein? No, it was the one thing they didn't talk about because they were so exposed with like Clinton and all that. If you're talking about the Democrats and their strategy that no, it was the one thing they would never attack Trump on. Cause also you have to look at it as two stories with Trump as well. Oh yeah. I'm the guy like on this. I'm literally the guy on the internet. Shut up then. I'm having a conversation. Somebody knows more about it than me. Donald Trump. Yeah. But that's what I'm saying. Some of the people you sit down with, you should know like the involvement, like, Donald Trump did. He was one of the earliest people to come out and help people that were trying to prosecute this case. You know, Brad Edwards has been on record, the lead defense attorney for the victims back in the original case has been on record with that for years. He had a falling out with Jeffrey Epstein. That's on record. It's disputed what Trump had. Yes. It's disputed what it's over. I lean towards, I think Brad Edwards had said there was a real estate deal. They both wanted a property in West Palm. Trump got it. They had a falling out because they're both egomaniacs, whatever. Or it's that, Jeffrey Epstein came onto a 15 year old towel hand at, you know, a girl at Mar-a-Lago and Trump kicked him out. Either one, whatever. They had a falling out, but there was a lot of time before that. And there are victims who talk about Donald Trump was in Jeffrey Epstein's office in upper Manhattan, you know, fucking three times a week. Maria Farmers said that before she worked the front desk there. So it, there's a lot going on there with him, but they never attacked him on it because the whole structure was exposed. It wasn't left or right. Like this is the most bipartisan story of my lifetime. So if you look at then what is the solution? What is the, the thing you need a candidate who can tell a story to the entire country that they have some better plan. And I think that that this ultimately comes back to why did mom Donnie went in New York? Because he was able to convince a portion of the population. He had a better plan than the other candidates. Yes. And some of it was that it was a new plan. Yes. Now, as we know, it's really an old plan, right? It doesn't work, Right. But it was a new fresh plan. It was putting this great rapper. It was a story of optimism. We're going to go change all this stuff, whatever. If you extrapolate all the way to where we are now, he's getting credit for the Knicks winning the NBA championship, right? Like the vibes in the city are amazing. It must be, you know, whatever. So like politicians always do this stuff, right? Where they kind of ride the waves. But I, I do think, and this is again, something I've changed my mind on is to affect change. You can't simply call out what is wrong. I agree a hundred percent. You have to show people here, here's the, here's the, the better path, right? But you don't just have to do that when it's something, listen, someone cheats on their taxes or something like that or whatever. And people want to make it into this whole thing. I may say that's just not, that's what's the Chamath line. That's below my line. Right. But like, yeah, raping kids around the world and shit and doing it on behalf of banking families that actually put the people that we think in charge are actually in charge. We're also, also they're raping the kids or protecting the people who do. Yeah. That's kind of a big deal to me. That's a really big deal to me. Now let's go and take this, uh, outside of the United States. I have not read the report, but there is the, uh, report that just came out from Rupert Lowe in the UK. Have you seen this yet? There is a, uh, a report, I think it is called the gang rape report. And it is basically about illegal immigrants in the UK is my understanding. And a pretty, uh, large number, I think I don't quote minutes. I think the number's like 250,000 girls got, uh, raped. And it seems like this was, you know, kind of debated. And now there's this report, whether the report's true or not. I don't know my question, which we won't get the answer to for another couple of years is how many people in that country, if that stuff turns out to be true, are going to go and vote differently because of it. I don't know. Right. And I think they should now we could sit here and say, what should the American people do? And I bet you we'd be 100% in line, like, Hey, you should vote. You should vote. You should vote. You should vote. You should vote for somebody who's going to make it actually more affordable, right? You should make, you should vote for somebody who's going to, you know, put criminals in jail, whatever, all groups are irrational. Yeah. But groups are irrational. But also I think that something that I have seen firsthand is people vote on one of two things, either what is good for them or how it makes them feel. All right. Let me do this. Cause I should have done this earlier than divorce just a Tuesday in November and who people are going to vote for. Yeah. Pretend that's not a thing when you have some something so sick and twisted in a powerful part of society these are the people that are paying the people that get elected elected in many cases including the people that get elected you have a rot that if you do not get your foot on that and change that in this technological world we've been talking about all day that rot will increase and it will fester and it will get worse and I know you study history like crazy I study history like crazy too and there are patterns that exist with Falls of empires over and over and over again and one of them that exists throughout time is when the elites get so far away from the common folk in every way from operating under a different set of laws to having an inordinate amount of wealth that gets worse and worse away from the people below them to treating the other people as not even people third class citizens these are all patterns I'm seeing right here and there is no story in my lifetime that is more emblematic of that than the Jeffrey Epstein case and so no is it like the thing that does that mean that like I think every debate on some election for whatever it is should be like so what's your take on absolutely no I'm a realist I understand that I agree with you on that but to then say well because this isn't going to be involved with elections let's just not worry about it and move forward that that I don't I I I'm not interested in moving forward on that I I I'm not interested in moving forward with with seeing people removed from power why why are these people getting closed door hearings that aren't recorded in DC why you and me would never get that Palm yeah I mean look we don't know the answer we don't know the answer I don't have the answer right but but I also could think of something Howard letnick paid five million dollars to the GOP super PAC for Congress right before he had to go and admit that he lied in front of Congress and everything first time he ever did that while he was in office for a year and a half I'm sure that's just a coincidence like these people do these things because they can they don't even give the effort of saying you they just do it and then they laugh yeah look there's no doubt that if you look at um again forget this situation for a second if you go and you look at uh other types of cases that certain people are treated a certain way yep others are not right there's uh famous uh studies around race around income levels you know one of the things I always point out to people is uh uh to get um not bail but um to get parole you know the worst time to go in front of the parole hearing it's right right before lunch yeah yeah crazy right and like it was only found because they did a bunch of you know this kind of longitudinal study or or whatever wasn't that Malcolm Gladwell I don't know I might be but like just like that data point alone right you're like dude you're telling me that the odds of you getting parole or not are based on what time of day you go in front of the thing and guess what there's probably some attorney who knows that and there's one attorney that doesn't and the one who doesn't is just like yeah I'll take whatever time great we're so glad to have a hearing and another attorney realizes hey if I go at a lot of time right now we're not going to we're our odds are lower so you know what we're actually going to kick it back two weeks we're going to leave you in jail for two weeks so we get a better time slot the parole here right so like this stuff always I think happens I feel uh unprepared in some of the details of some of this um in terms of uh knowing what happened what didn't happen what are some of the sequences Etc but I go back to what I do know is technology and Finance and when I when I go and I look at those people what I have over and over and over again found is that multiple things are true these people are very smart obviously they are very ambitious obviously they tend to be much more concerned with winning um than people probably realize so whether that is I want to be better than the person next to me I want respect from people I want uh to to have the self-respect of I succeeded there's something that drives them to have the ambition all this kind of stuff and then other aspect is i think that people as they become more successful resign themselves to the fact they will not be able to control the public message now there are some people who are still psychopathic about i can control this i can do you know stuff but for the most part most of the successful people i know they're like what am i going to do people are going to say what they're going to say about it i only thing i can control is what i can control and i'm going to focus on that so when you look at that you then start to say to yourself okay the positive and negative narratives about people are exactly that their narratives so there are probably people who we think are incredible go back 15 years ago 20 years ago bill gates his reputation and the public coverage of him was very different than it is today very curated right and so i think there's a lot of people who are and i forget like all the epstein stuff just like in general i think that you know i think that there's a lot of people who are like you know i think that there's a lot of people who are like you know i think that there's a lot of people who are like you know there was a shift from positive to negative right the people who made the system that was enclosed around them to make sure they stayed in their ivory tower suddenly created something with that they couldn't control and the narratives that they had created around themselves fell with it and when those narratives fell we realized that there were a lot of narratives we never even thought of or never even occurred to think of below them that was that case does that mean it was like that for all of them absolutely not but there are some that it's like yeah now now flip this okay take a jeff bezos i think that he probably had a really good reputation i think there was a period of time where it fell right there was the divorce there was all this stuff there's the hacking all this kind of buying the washington post things like that yeah but at least from my vantage point like he's kind of back to where he was people think that he's very smart they think that he's he has done some things in the last couple years that i'm like not the most evil thing i've ever seen right so like there's also this like ebb and flow of it's very hard to evaluate the world in a static manner yeah and say this person is you know bad all the time this person is good all the time james dolan 10 weeks ago you know people may have a different perspective they have today so it comes back to where do i spend my personal time i actually try not to spend that much time on individual people i try to spend my time more on trends and on what is that world going to look like now i may not take it to the extent of like you know what is the future of humanity or you know whatever that some of that stuff is but you're not building a bunker somewhere no okay but now here here's maybe one way to look at it is i'm probably not doing it because in my uh apparatus of things that i would spend money on that doesn't that doesn't qualify but if i had 20 billion dollars and you told me the bunker was a million bucks it's kind of like insurance like why not right like by the way i have no different information than you have right but like more than a million bucks but okay right yeah whatever whatever with 20 20 billion everything's like a million bucks right you know it's just like okay what like what is the downside and i think that that's another aspect of this is it's almost incomprehensible for us to think about certain things that people do because you're like why would you ever spend all whatever and then you realize well like there's probably things you would do for that cost 20 to them it's the same yeah but like you 10 years ago you'd be like i'd never spend money on it you'd be like i'd never spend money on it you'd be like i'd never spend on that right like because i don't have enough money right like whatever right so there is this other aspect to it again that doesn't um absolve people of doing bad things it doesn't whatever but it's just like it's very hard to think how somebody thinks and again my personal experience there are things that i'll spend money on now that save me time that literally a decade ago i would you you would catch me dead before i would do that right and so why well like i've learned that what can i do with that time back right now i've become smarter about that now building a bunker doesn't save you time right but i think that that's the other aspect of this is just like there's a lot of these different components and one of my favorite questions to ask people when i meet them especially very successful people is what did you do to ensure that your kids were not screwed up that's a great question right these are hyper successful people you know worth billions of dollars hundred dollars whatever every once in a oh no i screwed it up my kids are fucked like they're just like you know i'm not fooling myself i'm i'm the straight shooter like my kids screwed up one guy one time told me his kids were uh call it like um 10 to 18 years old you know kind of age range my kids have never seen the inside of a commercial plane so again like that's somebody who's actually pretty self-aware obviously knew they were making a trade-off decision of they didn't want to fly commercially or flying private okay how many people do you see on the internet talking about like if the parents and the kids go on a flight the parents try to go in first class and they'll send the kids to economy like completely different yeah you know thinking every time somebody tweets that like everyone freaks out whatever right build a character whatever nonsense they want to spin right so it's like those are like two ends of the same thing of like parents thinking about stuff now the good answers are usually some form of i made sure that my kid struggled i made sure my kid had to figure things out themselves on certain you know topic their kids aren't in the street starving they're not you know going to let their kids get hurt they're not you know going to expose their kids to some negative you know super bad situation but they at least understand that maybe there's a little bit of struggle that can be good for you oh yeah and think about this often it's always weird because there's real people one of my favorite quotes comes from 50 cent he was given an answer to a question and he says something to the effect of nah because where i come from ain't nobody got time to be depressed right and you're like dude he's not thinking about like how do i have my kid experience hardship right he's just like not dude we live in hardship right when he was growing up like he's i don't need to pretend i don't need to like have somebody you know manipulate the situation and so again it goes back to um talk about the nba finals recently is there any nba player who is the son of an nba superstar uh in the nba ever in history i believe the answer is zero in the nba maybe i'm blanking right now but you know what there are zero there are superstar players who were the son of journeymen or bench bench players kobe jaylen brunson right you can maybe part of it isn't jaylen brunson maybe it's the most recent example the father understood everything about the nba he understood what it took training wise what the right things were all this kind of stuff but it seems like maybe he was a better coach than he was doing it himself and he was able to teach his son you know play left-handed do these drills he's got a superstar son just for nba finals yeah and so you look at that and you say okay well that's physical sport it's very easy to tell you know what did the parent do what there are some examples of people who are very successful that their kids end up being very successful in business usually it happens one of two ways either they inherit or take over the business so think of like the murdochs um you know with fox and news corp think of um uh a variety of other types of businesses but also there's money so maybe the most largest example recently has been larry ellison and his son now going and buying these apps assets the sun is really running everything but the money's coming from the family etc right we celebrate in society rick and jaylen brunson because there's not really money right it's more like sweat it's you either can make the shot or you can't there's a video like i actually don't think people would look at jaylen and rick brunson the same way if there wasn't a video of him on the playground you know basketball court going up the hill backwards like all that kind of stuff on the other hand there is this like lineage of you know passing down assets money companies etc and i think part of it is every person who sees the jaylen brunson video is like that could be me and my kid yeah like there's a basketball court down the down the street yes could we go out there could i like force of will my kid into being an nba superstar jaylen's not that tall right you know like you know it's not like he's got you know some ripped six-pack whatever like that could be my kid that could be me and then you look at that across sports right and people say whether it's soccer baseball baseball baseball you know it's not like he's got you know some ripped six-pack basketball football whatever keep going you're cooking yeah but in business we don't think that way that's right right no one's like oh that guy who gave those assets to his kid and his kid is now successful a lot of people are like that could be me now some of that i think leads into that's why people get mad the nepotism the the the wealth generation the hoarding of assets the k-shaped all this stuff is like tied together but again it goes back to if we could tell an optimistic story and tell people hey you know what you don't have to go create amazon go i don't know create a laundromat down the street but if you can build this and then you can hand it to your kid you could have your own mini version of that maybe yeah right yeah now all of a sudden you start to think very very long term and i think that that is probably the single thing i see in society in general that is missing is that people lose hope they lose hope right and they now start to think like my kid is going to have a worse life than me i don't like that right and the kid is going to have a worse life than me right and the kid is going to have a worse life than me and that's the thing though pomp when you look at it statistically right we live in the best time in human history statistically by every metric. But when you look at opportunity and economics, generationally speaking, we have seen at least for the first time, as far as I know, in the history of America, maybe there was one other time I'm forgetting in the 19th century, but we are seeing for the first time where the older generation that's retiring, the boomer generation, has enjoyed the American dream to an extent that the generation coming into the workforce, the Gen Z generation, cannot even comprehend across the average. Doesn't mean that at the top, there can't be bigger prizes than there were for boomers. That's true with the internet economy. But when you look at the average, the ability to buy a house, the ability to come out of college, not with fucking debt chained around your neck, the ability to have children without it being a financial decision, the lack of inflation that's occurred, the fact that boomers bought up all the houses for fucking $10 in 1971 and never sold it, and now they're worth a million dollars. No one can get it. These things are real. And so it's not to be a downer, but you have to look at the perspective of like, all right, what opportunities are we giving the younger generations that pale in comparison to the opportunities we gave to previous generations before them? I'm not saying the boomers planned that out. They didn't. That's not fair to say. No, but incentives take over. But incentives take over. And so we're living through a time where, again, it's not like the boomers think this at all. So I would never accuse people of doing that, but it's the first time. It's the first time where passively you have a generation that actually didn't care as much about the next generations having a better world than they did. You really ready to get nice and fun? Go there. Look at this chart. Older Americans support raising taxes on younger workers to maintain current social security benefits. I don't think I could have memed that any better. 89% of people over the age of 65 think we should raise taxes on younger people so they can keep getting their social security. That's insane. By the way, I'm shocked it's not 99%. That's insane. Right? Just think about how crazy this number is. Young people think that they should cut the benefits to benefit the young people. 53% of young people think that we should cut social security benefits so that it benefits young people and they're not paying into the system. Like this chart to me may be one of the most important charts to understand the American society, politics, economy, et cetera. So is this why we have to build? Data centers, because that'll pay for it. Well, we can talk about the data center stuff, but here's what ends up being crazy is you have 89% of people over the age of 65 who are like, take from them to give to me. Yeah. I went to college for 10 bucks. I bought a house for 20. They went to college to get a gender studies degree for 150 grand in debt at fucking 7%. And they're not going to buy a house for their entire life. They're going to own nothing and be happy, but tax them more. That's insane. That's nuts. That's actually like that. Wow. Now data centers, data centers, one of the best data points. Do you have like an earpiece in Kevin O'Leary talking to make sure you hit them with this part about China? No. Loudoun County in Virginia has the most density of data centers in the country is my understanding. Loudoun County also has one of the lowest personal property tax rates in the country. Okay. So there's a relationship between either the people who live there pay the taxes or corporations pay the taxes. Remember we talked about road paved to hell with good intentions. Listen, that, that, that is all of the world. Everyone's got good intentions. And what is the outcome now in Loudoun County? They have one of the lowest tax rates on property because the corporations are paying. Now they have high density. That sounds good. That sounds like everyone should want a data center to come to their local area. If that means they're going to pay lower taxes, right? Plays into, Hey, I want to pay lower taxes. That'd be great. So yeah, sure. Put it down the street. Doesn't sound good. If it's going to be in your backyard and there's a humming sound all day, or if you're using all the water. So now we don't have the water. There's basically, in my opinion, there's four things that people get upset about the data centers. The first thing is that, Oh, you're lying to me. You make it sound so good. And so it's not really going to create all the jobs. It's really not going to create jobs. One second. That's the one thing that people say. The second thing that I think people say is the energy. You're pulling from the grid. You're doing all this stuff. The third thing I think is water. And the fourth is sound, right? So really it is, it doesn't create as many jobs as you say. Also the tenants, the tenants, the people who will be in there. You're talking about open AI, Microsoft, Google. Do people care whether they're going to the data center? I care if those companies get an oligopoly on AI and the surveillance state. I absolutely care about that. Yeah. Okay. But Palantir is like becoming a tenant for some data center over in fucking Montclair. They go to build one there or wherever the fuck. Yeah. I don't like that. Well, are you down for the data center? If it is a Sesame street? Why would they have a date? Why would they be in the day? I just mean like, do people care about the date? The D in my opinion, right? Based on the conversations I've had with people, it's more of, I don't want the data center where I want the data center less about, I I'll take the data center as long as it's a good company that I like going in there versus I don't want the data center, not because of the data center, because of the company. Well, it's the same people selling us. This are the people who sold us the climate crisis and eat through plastic straws to save the fucking, yeah, those people were stupid, right? But it's the same people who are selling that to get in here now and talking about this. Those are the companies that had people that were donating to all the campaigns that fucking sold that for years. You also do have the energy, the, the energy issue with the grid. We've already seen there's 49,000 people who are going to be out 75% of their power and have to pay way more out in Nevada for some new fucking, you know, data center that's coming in because that company basically is sucking all that up. And you do have the problem with them not creating jobs as well. There are a bunch of computers running on chips that are, and it's making noise and it ruins the, it ruins the ambiance of the whole community as well. Like what I really don't appreciate is when Kevin O'Leary tries to come out and say, yeah, it's George Soros sending all these people out here to no dude, people don't fuck with this. You have to, you have to meet them halfway. All right. So back up, let's say that there's five things on Beyonce. I think is a good fifth thing that people don't like. Mm-hmm. We can agree right out of the box that there's five things on Beyonce that people don't like. If you're going to put them anywhere near people, make them look nice. If I knock down a bunch of trees and wildlife in Utah that looks beautiful, I could build the greatest building of all time. I could build like a prime fucking 1931 style, beautiful empire state building looking fucking data center. It's going to be worse. Well, but what I'm just saying is if people from an ambience standpoint, and I think the data center companies are starting to do this. I've seen some of the designs that people have been floating around and stuff. They're trying to make them look nicer. Mm-hmm. Okay. So we agree on that point. I think that they're going to hear they're going to do that. On water, almost every single data center that is now being contemplated, designed, et cetera, they have closed loop systems, which means that they're not going to use any water outside. My guess, I don't know if it's for sure. What does that mean? A closed loop system basically means that water is put in. Almost think of it like a cooler maybe is a good way. Once you put the ice in, everything stays in there, right? And so you ever seen like the cold plunges, some of them, like the nicer ones, you put water in and then it basically circulates in that system, but you're not bringing new water into the system. So a closed loop system basically means whatever water you put into it, it just stays in there and they're constantly cleaning it. So it's just the same thing. The same water keeps being cleaned and being cooled so they can do the cooling effect on the correct, correct. But they're not pulling new ones. So right now there's basically two different types of systems in the data centers. One pulls tons of water. One is a closed. My guess is that because of a lot of the pushback, 100% of data centers that get built going forward, it's, you know, whenever they strike the period are going to be closed looped. So I put that in the category of good critique, going to get solved by these companies because they realize if they don't solve the problem, they ain't getting data. Right. So I think most people who are complaining about the water would be happy if we moved to closed loop system as the default, because then it solves the problem. If that is what you say it is, and I'm not smart enough to be able to be informed, to be able to say that in theory sounds like that is okay. So I don't actually know if it's more expensive or less expensive to do the closed loop system. What I do know is that their hand is being forced because people are complaining. So your point earlier about the complaints are leading to change. I think that that's what I've seen so far. Yeah, they should pay for that themselves. That should be. If Kevin O'Leary is so worried about his life legacy being fighting China with this, then he shouldn't be concerned about how big his profit margin is on this issue. But he said, I believe a direct quote he gave Tucker I saw on the clip was money doesn't matter to me at all. I've made enough of it. I want my legacy to be that we're fighting China. Okay. I accept your terms. Now don't be trying to look to cut every fucking corner to make the most money as possible. Otherwise you are just giving me false words to try to sell me something to get me to close the deal. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Give me to shut the fuck up. So I just looked up now that this is a grok I'm using. Um, Kevin O'Leary's proposed data center project is designed with a closed loop water cooling system. Okay. So doesn't mean that we got to like it, but he gets a check mark on that. I think for most people of, Hey, you're not going to pull it now on the energy grid poll. There's two components to this that I think are important. The first is there are certain places in America data center goes in. One of the problems is that the energy grid is so bad and so old, they actually can't pull enough energy. Like, like the actual pipes don't have enough energy come through in those cases. What we've seen is data centers show up and they say, you know what? We're going to make so much money on this data center. We'll just upgrade your entire grid. So the data center pays for the energy grid up upgrade, which means anyone on that grid benefits because the data center is paying for it. Right now you can imagine the utility companies, love this because they're like, Hey, we get upgraded infrastructure and these morons are going to go and they're going to pay for it. It's not going to come off our balance sheet. Okay, great. Not every time. So in the cases where people are pulling from the grid and they're persistently pulling, what ends up happening is electricity prices can go up. Now, if I remember correctly, my understanding is that in places where data centers have gone in, the price of electricity actually on a national average goes down. Part of that is the upgrades, right? So if you imagine trying to do computations on an old computer versus a new one, you should, it should be cheaper to use the new computer because it's faster, better, better memory, better chips, all this stuff. Now, another thing is that a lot of these grids are moving to something called like a power balancing or a dynamic kind of power. What that means, is you're pulling. So like, I know a lot of us comes to Bitcoin miners. They became famous for this. Bitcoin miners pull all this energy and they're using it to mine Bitcoin. But then the grid sometimes would come to them and say, Hey, we need that power. We know that you are supposed to have it, but there's a blackout or there's some, you know, a lot of air conditioning or something, right? We'll pay you extra money to give it back to us. And so what they do is they essentially in the Bitcoin world, they shut off their machines. When they shut off the machines, that power is available. And the company goes and does it. Now, why do they shut it off? Economics. I was pulling that power and I was mining and I was making a dollar per minute or whatever. But you're telling me if I shut off my machines, you'll give me $2 a minute. Well, I just shut off the machines. I'm going to make more money, right? Now that power gets reality. And so there's some of that, that really started in Texas, something called ERCOT, which is basically like the electrical grid. And they had less regulations, a separate type of system that many people have around the country. And so, again, if the data centers start coming to say, Hey, look, we're going to use whatever power we need, but when you need it, we'll give it back to you. Great. Now the difference is with Bitcoin mining, you can shut the machine off, turn it back on. If you're Facebook, you can't shut off Facebook and turn it back on. Right. So that is a whole part of this, of the type of tenant becomes really important because some are going to be able to do this and some are not going to be able to do it. I also think that just if they really believe in it and they really need it, and I'm going past Kevin O'Leary at this point, I'm talking to the people that are going to get the downstream costs as tenants and stuff that are the fucking masters of the universe that are fucking countries as businesses. Like then you shouldn't, you should have the decency to not ask for tax breaks and everything. Like if you're going to go do this to people and put in, I think they've had to shrink the one that Kevin's doing now because of the backlash, but like it was going to be 62 square mile data centers in the middle of these people's communities where they've lived for generations and stuff. You have to read the room. You know what I mean? And that's, that's, that's my biggest gripe with Kevin. He seems to have no ability to read the room with this. And he speaks about it very matter of factly and almost like cold businessman style. And you have to understand that, like, even if in his head, let's say he, he really believes he's doing the right thing. And let's say that I had a crystal ball in 10 years from now, we're going to say, wow, you know, he was right about this. You have to be able to empathize with people who are not, who don't have access to all the information you do, right. And also have reasonable complaints, including the companies that will be going in there. We've just lived through the COVID time where these companies did not exactly have a very good record on things. And so it's perfectly understandable that something that's not bringing in jobs and all these other problems, even if some of them, as you say, are solvable, you know, that people are going to be like, fuck this. So don't, don't try to sell it another way. And also like China doesn't have nearly as many of these things as we do. And even if you want to argue that they're going to be building them, it's like, do you want to, if you're trying to beat China, do you want to risk fucking becoming them just to win, you know? And by becoming them, I mean, it's like you have giant monopolistic oligopolistic type companies that basically take control and get to have the fingers on the scale of the future of the average person because they get the power and continued scales of economy with something like this to be able to pop up all over the country out of nowhere. It's like, these are genuine moral questions to be asking. And I don't say that at all as an expert on data centers to be very clear, but like, I think I have a good reason to be, have a lot of hesitancy with how this is being rammed down people's throats. So there's a couple of things that, um, there's no perfect one thing to look at, but if we look at us versus China, there's this chart that has electricity generation, um, that we're going to pull up here. And what it shows is that the United States had this massive lead, but we basically didn't make that much investment. We haven't really moved off the baseline, right? China on the other hand has gone like all in that's right. And has done this. No, this is for grids. You're talking about here. This is electricity generation in general. So we can look at exactly what their definition of that is, but just like think of it as electrical grid output, right. Is continuing to skyrocket in China. Now, some of that is if you start in the Stone ages, right. And there's no connected water sewer electricity phone, you know, all this kind of stuff, but to your point, they still passed us tremendously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In 2010, they passed us right. And they've been kicking our butt, you know, since then. Now the U S you can see a slight little uptick there at the very end of the U S line. Right. So I think that there's a lot of people who point to this and say from a national security standpoint, like, Hey, if they have more power generation, that's, that's not good. Right. The reason they say that is there's this famous chart that shows, um, there's basically no. Prosperous low energy consumption country in the world. So that makes prosperity is tied to consuming energy, right? You're consuming a lot. And that means you can then transform that into different industries, products, all this kind of stuff. And so when you look at that, you need to have the end. The reason why that looks interesting is now this is the United States average retail price of electricity on a month over month basis or per month going all the way back to, I think 2000, 2000. Okay. It's pretty much been going up in every single region, call it on the average doubled. Correct. Now you can see towards. 2023 ish or so in some places there's been a uptick. And I think that's part of what people are saying, like, Hey, w what is driving this? Right. And is it data centers? Is it something else? Now, unfortunately it's hard to unpack because that's also when inflation exploded. Mm-hmm right. And so again, I'm not here to say that, oh, data centers don't make electricity prices go up by any means. What I do think though, is it's really hard to point at one single culprit. I think electricity. Prices are too high. Mm-hmm I think that there are probably private market solutions from a technology standpoint that can get electricity down. That's that was the promise of solar and some of the stuff, right? But also it's a confluence of factors. That's right. It's high inflation. It's data centers. It's the fact that now we all right. Are all sitting at home. I mean, one of the things that people don't really talk about, I remember when families would leave their home, everyone would leave. You go to school, people go to work, whatever. And you would like shut off the AC, right? Right. Yeah. Sounds wild. Now. Well, with remote work, no one leaves, right? So you're generating all this stuff, right? Which again, everyone collectively is doing this more. I also think that in a weird way, the rise of Instagram people, I, I don't know this for sure. My guess is people do more laundry. I don't think laundry is some huge component of electricity consumption. Right. But like how you, I don't think it's Instagram, but I definitely do. But like how you look is leading to, you know, there's all this like looks, maxing and peptides. And you know, all that kind of like crazy rise, but like same thing with clothes. And so you, you look at this stuff and you start to realize like, okay, there's a lot of factors here. Data centers are part of this for sure, but not all of it. And so I look at it and I say, okay, let's go study the places where it's actually coming down. And usually what it is is that the data centers are making the investment to upgrade the grids. And so again, I go back to, it's not black or white. It's data centers can be an enormous tool for a community. If it gets your property taxes down, if it lowers your electricity bill, not raises your electricity bill, like all these components, what ends up happening? Those data center, people just dig their heels in and the people who don't like the data center start screaming at them. And we get the super electric videos. You got to talk about the tenants though. That's a big part of it. Like what, let me ask you this. What has Meta, what has Palantir, what has open AI done over the last five years that says, yeah, I should trust these guys. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Yeah. They'll I'm cool with my backyard being a part of their grand plans. That's a reasonable question to ask from the average American. Is it not? If you think of the premise of Facebook, right. Which I don't know, some large percentage of people, they only interact with Facebook for one of two reasons, communicate with friends and family or somehow discover communicate, et cetera, with businesses. Okay. Yeah. Both of those are super net positive. Yeah. Right. Are there negative things that happen? Of course, I would argue that there's probably negative side effects from a mental standpoint of people just being on Facebook and scrolling in the feed. Yes. Right. Absolutely. Proven. Yeah. But the fact that you can communicate with people that you might not otherwise connect with, stay up to date with, you know, all this stuff, huge net positive. So I look at it as a Facebook's been a net positive on the world. It's informed people helped educate people. It's helped them stay connected, meet people, do all this kind of stuff. Right. Mm-hmm should we address the negative side effects? Of course. Right. But I think my default position is the company is a net positive for the world not a net negative and rather than go at it from a it's negative we got to try to find positive i go at it and i say this thing needs to exist in the world because it's been a huge benefit to billions of people but those five things that are negative let's go try to solve them okay again back to some of the people running these places let's say i buy that argument for facebook over which by the way i'll give a shout out to facebook meta as a company over the last couple years for something that i'm monitoring they've been far better with free speech over the last couple years we'll see how long that lasts but objectively i'll say that but then you look at a place like open ai run by sam altman who's crazy and you look at a place like palantir which i've already beat the drum on that six fucking times today like again these are companies that are going in these places and it's like i i don't like that i'm not i i go build on your own and don't do it in my backyard that's my attitude with it so people may not like this uh this logic but let's just look at um active monthly users of open a deep just looks over so the active monthly users of open ai is reported to be approximately 1 billion people globally in may or june of 2026 so let's just use that as a nice round number a billion people are using the product if they go build a data center in five different places it's their data center which they usually aren't they usually go into something else but let's say they go and they build it and they do it in a place the size of manhattan which means that in that general five boroughs about nine million people so every data center they build and let's say it's negative impact nine million people are negatively affected by that data center but they build five of them i don't like to do public math i think that's 45 45 million people but a billion people benefit from the product again if i'm one of the 45 people the billion people benefit or they do they all become surveillance slaves if i'm one of the 45 million people i might be going to the meeting i might be saying i don't want this here right but if i'm one of the billion people i'm oblivious i'm let me just ask my questions give me the answers may help me make more money do all these positive whatever i use that data center because i'm one of the 45 million people and i'm one of the 45 million people and i'm one of the 45 million people and i'm one of the 45 million people and i'm one of the 45 million people and i'm one of the 45 million people and i'm one of the 45 million people and absurd you know kind of exaggeration of the the problem because it's the most density in america right every single person hates it versus a billion people being used right now boil that down to some local town montclair or wherever it's not nine million people maybe it's only a couple hundred thousand people but it doesn't matter if it's nine million or two hundred thousand if i'm one of the two hundred thousand i'm at the meeting yelling and screaming and saying i think this is bad and so what i see is that if i'm one of the two hundred thousand people and i'm one of the two hundred thousand people and i'm one of the two hundred thousand people is well how many of their complaints are real the one to me that i think people don't put enough effort on that actually is something that i don't see a solution for is the sound now it doesn't affect people that are like you know a mile away or whatever if you're right there if you're right there right would you want to have a data center in your backyard that's humming of course not right so the reason why i say that is you have to try to figure out what are the things that are solvable and what are not i think that this is a great way to put it like in the sense that where we are with an argument on this and on other things it's like you are a business guy and a numbers guy world needs a lot of those i am a purely creative guy and let's say like a human empathy kind of guy i don't think i'm right and i don't think you're right i think the answer has to bridge the gap between those two hundred percent and i think that's why conversations like this are important you know it's like i feel a certain type of way about it but like i could i'll change my opinion on evidence that's one thing i do i don't i really pride myself on being able to do that over time and i think i've done that with a lot of things so like i'm willing to do that here but i think some of the questions of like you know like the trade-off there it's i don't think it's as simple as 45 million people versus a billion people get all benefit what is the things that the billion people get for benefit versus what they're actually giving up and doing it and then you're leaving people behind more extreme example admittedly right here so it is not quite a parallel but they used to be like this logic at the height of the cold war in the state department and in the pentagon where there were literally people who thought in terms of math with nukes so they'd be like well if the soviets hit us we'd lose 65 but then we'd hit them back and they'd lose 240 and we'd win by 175 and it's like you're talking about millions of people they 65 means 65 million people they looked at that as a mathematical and not just a total loss for humanity, which it would have been. And I don't want to fall down that trap with like, you know, the future of what people's rights are and their ability to have freedom and pursue the American dream and also find freedom in places around the world, not just here. I want to see that as well. And it's like, that's where my concern is. And, you know, it's like, I would talk with Kevin O'Leary. We were actually emailing with his people before this whole thing came up. I don't know if he would want to come on now, but like, it doesn't mean he's like a bad guy. I just want to understand if like he, he can at least empathize with where people are coming from. And I haven't seen that yet. My understanding on his in particular, isn't his like in the middle of the desert? No, like away from everybody. No, it's not in the middle of the desert. Oh, I thought his was like way out in the middle of nowhere. No, it's still going to be like 40 square miles or something. I saw, I did see one video which cracked me up, which was, uh, I think that it is, if it's not a desert, it's like in a valley type scenario. And, uh, there was a study done that, uh, the data center could raise the temperature of the valley, like 2% to like 29% temperature, right? Like, like something that was like, almost, it's like not even valuable because the, the, you know, it's like, Hey, I could be a smart or dumb, right. You know, somewhere in between. And somebody made a video and was like, Kevin O'Leary's data center is going to increase the temperature of the state of Utah by 29%. You can't do that. You can't, you can't run. And it was like, listen, by the way, there may be legit data centers that are going to increase the temperature of the state of Utah by 29%. Which are not doing yourself any favors by saying that the average temperature of the entire state's going to go 29%. You got to fight. You got it. If you're going to have these arguments, you have to try. That's why, like when I say I'm short-sighted on something, I'll tell you that. Cause it's like, I don't have all the information on X, Y, or Z. I bring it up because I do think that there are people who blindly go into these pros and cons. Yes. And they just, they torture data. They do whatever they can to go viral online. That's right. And my best piece of advice for folks, and I've tried really hard to get better at this over the last, you know, five, six years. If you have a question, go to the internet. If you want to understand something, go to the internet, go to people. Yeah. Well, just like get on the internet and you have AI tools. You have Google, you have, you know, podcasts, YouTube, all this stuff. Just type in whatever the thing is that you heard and double check, by the way, I don't know, 70%, 80% of the stuff I hear is actually exactly what it seems to be. And I just am confirming it. Maybe I learned a little bit extra or something. And I'm like, Oh, uh, that person is an idiot. Right. Completely wrong. Right. But when I did it now, it's hard to do that. Cause we're so used to just like, whatever you hear, you take as fact with. Yeah. Right. I'd be careful with that. And so I think that it's just like, you now have the tools to inform yourself. Like you have the agency from an information standpoint, just do that as a starting point. And you will get a way clearer picture about it's usually not black and white. It's usually gray. Yeah. Are you invested in any of these things in the data centers? Um, not directly like in any of the data centers. I'm trying to think of any businesses. Um, I was helping, uh, one of the guys, um, hut eight, uh, for a little bit. I'm not officially involved anymore or anything like that, but, um, I think that they've done a pretty good job. What kind of companies that, uh, they had Bitcoin mining and then they spun out all the Bitcoin mining in the Bitcoin and now they just do AI data centers, but they go and they do like really large scale net new thing, you know, Texas, Louisiana, stuff like that. Um, so I'm not involved there anymore, but I think those guys are pretty smart and on top of it. Um, but I don't think that there's anything else, uh, that I'm like directly involved with, um, that is data center related. My general theory in terms of like investing in the world right now on the software side, you have two different approaches. There is general purpose models, open AI, Claude, you know, kind of do a bunch of different things. And then there are specialized workflows. I think that there will be a couple of winners in generalized models. I think that you'll get open AI, anthropic. I think that, uh, maybe like a XAI or somebody will kind of catch up with a grok. That's pretty much it on the specialized workflows. I think that we are drastically underestimating how many people are going to win here. So CFO Sylvia in finance, you know, go through education, healthcare, kind of all these different things. Harvey is a legal thing, you know, whatever. So they're going to come up with all of these verticalized approaches in software. The area that maybe I think is most interesting that is not yet talked about. So all that I think is interesting, but a the area I think is most interesting is physical AI and robotics. And the reason why I think that's interesting is because you're taking the power of the AI and the models and all the software and stuff, but now you're actually affecting physical things to happen in the real world, right? So humanoid robots is probably the one that everyone like visually understands the, the most Amazon today, uh, the latest numbers I saw 1.5 million human employees, 750,000 robots. That number's going to flip. Doesn't mean that they're going to have less people. I actually think Amazon will have more people in the future than they have today. Then how does that flip? Because the robot adoption is accelerating so fast because one of the things is that we have a shortage of meaning it would be like maybe i'm just drawing out numbers three million people but 10 million robots correct correct yeah so like the number of people continues but the robots are at a faster pace right and we've seen that already like the number of amazon workers has been increasing but they went from zero to 750 000 robots in a short period of time and so if you look at humanoid robots it's very easy for people to see and not be as worried about it going into like corporate environments or warehouses or whatever it's just very obvious we don't have enough people part of that i believe is why biden opened the border and was like we just need more bodies in here now obviously wasn't you know didn't take into account all the negative side effects of this it caused a rise of you know affordability it obviously all the criminal activity all kinds of stuff right but one thing is he got a lot more people into the workforce well let's get out of the corporate environment or the warehouse what happens when now they're cleaning well we have cleaning robots right we have these things that go on the ground whatever they don't look like humanoids but they clean okay a lot of people buy those they put them there whatever would you put a robot in your house a humanoid robot walking around and doing stuff okay but people put the cleaning robots they put the alexa they put this stuff i'm not saying that there's no downsides to it i don't i'm not saying you're not going to do it right but like okay we're one step closer to it i'm not saying you're not going to do it right but like okay we're one step closer there to get another step what happened what would have to be true for people to let the robot babysit their kids so i have kids guess what almost every single mother i don't know how big your mom audience is but every single mother we have a very big female audience all right yeah so they will all resonate with this which is you know it's really popular among moms regardless of kids up to maybe like age seven eight nine years old they all put cameras in their kids rooms now yeah so when they're babies or even when they're you know toddlers etc is they put these cameras in there right you know one of the things that they can do on the cameras so they can press a button on their cell phone they could talk yes through it yeah my buddy chaz and his wife was doing that yeah and the kids know where the camera is and they like will point to it and be like you know mom's talking to me it's like an intercom camera you know and they're like oh my god i'm not going to do it you know type you know evolution's getting weird bro 20 years ago like the parent had to get up and go walk in there right well guess what the moms do when a babysitter comes over they may go to dinner and they just pull out their phone every once in a while and they look at the thing so like rather than text the babysitter they just look at this yeah right okay at some point somebody is going to be like the technology is good enough i've got the camera i'll just let the robot like you know while the kids sleep and stay at home yeah so again i'm not saying i would do that i'm not advocating for that but like you start to push the extreme new world now let's go back to your conversation about some of the people we've been talking about as people myself for them try to understand this that could be twisted as like anthony popliano is advocating for robots to be taking care of children and you know blah blah whatever right or it can be like no i actually think that that is just the trajectory that we're on right what are the ramifications like what happens if the babysitter market gets blown up where do young you know people go to make money when they're in high school is there some new job create whatever right so you start to think about the humanoids in your home i use that as the most sensitive thing it's the most sensitive area for you to be this is the most sensitive thing with your kids it's the most sensitive in terms of your personal possessions etc within i don't know 10 years i think that they're going to be at least definitely wealthy people maybe even others depending on the price point it's going to be pervasive maybe it's it's getting it's getting interesting and there will be things adopted that today seem crazy that later we'll be like all right this isn't so bad and maybe some things that get adopted that seem crazy later we're like yes that was actually even crazier than we thought so we'll have to say do you go in a self-driving car i've never been in a self-driving car i mean teslas can self-drive but i've never been in a car while tesla's actually self-driving would you get in a like a waymo or it doesn't have the human driver um i have plenty of friends who have done it i haven't thought about whether i would do it or not i i probably would yeah so like i take you as somebody who's fairly skeptical about a lot of things right depends on what it is all right yeah technology in the big company but like you would trust your life to larry and sergey and google to drive you around automobile i don't know if i automobile crashes second thought but you know well automobile crashes are you know one of the biggest uh ways people die what's interesting is that actually all the data shows that the machines are better at driving than the humans it's safer to be right the data shows up so now what we're starting to see which is very interesting um i think it's lemonade is the insurance company came out and said if you're driving in a tesla you're on the tesla and you own it and self-driving is engaged your insurance rate will be 50 percent lower well now there's an economic incentive for people to get in the self-driving car now they're doing it from an underwriting perspective because they're saying well it's less likely there's gonna be a car accident you know whatever right if you're a parent what's one of the number one things that you don't want to put your kid in an uber for who's the driver right right yeah it takes away my you know if i have a 13 year old daughter yeah you don't some random dude's not picking her up and taking her in an uber 100 but a self-driving car that maybe even i have a camera feed into so i can see what's going on if it's safer it's nobody's kidnap like you get in this weird world of the thing that you think you would never do actually there's the argument that like that's the thing you should do right put your kid in a car with no driver sounds insane until the data shows that it's safer right and so the question that boils down to is it actually safer and the people who control this technology what are they what are they trying to do those are the questions we are going to answer dude we've been talking for three and a half hours it's been a blast you're a good sport about everything too i appreciate it let me push back you're coming attacking a bunch of my friends and everything be careful with that friend's term yeah it depends on different people yeah i'm gonna start vetting some friends for you but everyone we'll put all your links down below make sure i got everything in there you're a great follow on x and then also on instagram as well you're posting there a lot as well and then let's stick your website in there so people could see all the projects you're working on cfo sylvia.com cfo sylvia.com let's get it thief pomp thanks brother of course thank you for having me everyone else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace hey guys if you're not following me on spotify please hit that follow button and leave a five star review they're both a huge huge help thank you check engine abs or maintenance light on take the guesswork out of your warning lights with o'reilly veriscan the service is free and provides a report with 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